Rji-chaos-knowplace
Fleshing out the KnowPlace! idea from RJI's CDiG event
Here's a rough transcription by Bill Densmore of the presentation on March 16, 2010 of the "KnowPlace!" idea as part of the Center for Digital Globe symposium at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism, Columbia, Mo.
BETH POLISH: How many of you wanted to find something or you can remember where, it’s on the tip of your tongue and but you can’t remember where it was or where an object went? Raise your hands. Don’t lie, I’m not the only one who’s ever had a senior moment.
(Now consider this in the virtual rather than physical space, with documents, emails, photos, links).
Welcome to KnowPlace. Welcome to your knowable world. one Imagine an environment where you could have any digital piece of content that you’ve ever used, read, created in a place that was completely searcible, so you need to do a complete presentation on global warming and you know somewhere you read an article in your favorite newspaper or magazine on global warming and you could type into your little search bar and up came an article that you read before. So this is content that you’ve touched before. It would be kind of a pretty cool thing.
Imagine if you could in addition to that have recommendations for other types of content and it saw what it was that you were searching and the kinds of content that you were storing and uploading and it made recommendations to you for other types of content that you like. Imagine if you could share this with other people that you were working with or that you worked for or for your friends and it was all in one place and you had a little icon that was on your desktop or smartphone for the 17 percent of smartphones out there that have this capability. You clicked on it and up it came.
That is KnowPlace.
K.V. RAO: We all have had this problem where we have seen something at one time. And among the statistics we found, from International Data Group, that 35 percent of the average worker’s time is spent wasted in searching for documents. That is the problem we are trying to solve. To reduce that 35 percent. You will be much more production and have information at your fingertips.
How are we going to do it? There are different elements to it.
POLISH: We are going to employ a freemium model. There will be different levels of storage space. And you can buy additional storage if you like. There is a family edition, if you want to share photos, and there is a corporate edition. Imagine if you were doing a project and you are a reporter and you do an article, investigation, all this reporting and now you give it to your legal department to do fact checking you would share this package to your editor right there. So there are three levels of products that we’ll be offering.
In terms of revenue, we do believe this is a venture-backed of company and we will have a “hockey stick” here in year five. We assume in year one there is no revenue at all. We’ll have some modest revenue for our personal and family edition and corporation edition will kick in in later years.
RAO: In the first year we think when start making money is about 20,000 users in the first year and going to 120,000 paid users. Obviously expect to attract millions of users out of the 212 million users and there will be huge uptake in the free product and natural upsell. On the conference side we just expect to sell to 100 corporations in the first year, three when we launch the business and going to 900 to 1,000 corporations. So very, very realistic estimates about the uptake in the market.
POLISH: And if you think about the percent of workers time spent actually looking for documents, you have a very clear value proposition to offer corporations about why they should be buying this product.
In terms of competition, there clearly are competitors out there doing pieces of what we are doing. We are glad there is competition, it says there is actually is a market for our product and service. There is Evernote, which is all about note-taking. We’re going to have automatic archiving. The other thing we’re going to have is, imagine that you give a speech and you annotate notes on it, you can scan it and put it immediately into your archives. You’ve got Semanto, which is recommendations only, we’ll be adding. You’ve got Del.icio.us, you’ve got StumbleUpon, Lexis-Nexis, which is research. We will get that kind of stuff through partnerships. We would be remise if we did not have Google and its search. We believe with our context-based search what we will have will be really valuable to us as individuals, to go back into our personal database not just everything that is out there on the web.
(Polish outlines the requirements of a management team. Including library scientist, taxonomy expert. )
Strategic partners would include schools, Amazon and DocumentCloud, which is doing “much of this stuff for the news and journalist market. They are not-for-profit and text based. We think we could partner with them for some of the technology and then extend it into video and other areas.”
Challenges and risks: Need to do multiple devices and have lots of media sources.
A marketplace challenge is how people will to having all their stuff in the cloud.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS (this section is paraphrased):
Q: Is this like InstaPaper on the iPhone.
RAO: It is across all media and platforms. Everything you are doing is automatically archived; you don’t have to do at thing. It will find things from your personal archive or library.
Q: How does it work?
A: You can keyword search that will look across your archives for a phrase. You can also tag your content with key words. It will find it both ways. Training users about taxonomy will make it more reliable at finding things.
Q: Would you take on people and places?
A: Yes, absolutely. A much as the context would be captured when it is archived. It will be key for the designers to understand how people relate and recall information.
Q: (Rueben Stern) If the system had a record of everything a person had read, that would be tremendously valuable information from a personalization point of view. Did we think about that as a revenue stream.
A: If we do this well, we have a lot of opportunity in the future. If we do the core right.
Q: The FBI would be very interested (laughter).
A: A group effort. Jennifer came up with the logo.
Q: Reuben touched on privacy in his question. Would people want to have all their relationships and stuff shared to Google, for example.
A: BILL DENSMORE: Clearly there is a big privacy issue here. Everything about this will have to be opt in. But that’s what we haven’t included that in this initial because we’re going to have to get some mileage on the system to understand how many of our users want to opt in to that
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