Ideas to kick start innovative thinking

A school friend asked me last night about how to build a unicorn-scale business from a relatively small amount of capital. Essentially it's a question of innovation -- given the worst problem in your industry, or the area that most begs for disruption, how do you kick start your brain to think of better solutions? 

So far, I've come up with six thought triggers.

• The etherealisation of devices. For example, 20 years ago, medical devices consisted of very expensive sensors with a bit of dumb logic to give a result. Today, it's a race to the bottom on dumb sensors with more and more sophisticated logic. What's the cheapest thing you could use to take a measurement?


• The availability of motion and position sensors. How would it help if you knew exactly where data was entered? Or if you knew how your physical product moved in real-time?


• Explore some of the demonstrations on http://www.alchemyapi.com/products/demo (now part of IBM Watson). In particular, look at their ability to do sentiment analysis -- to give you a summary of how people are feeling about topics. What could you do with a summary of everything your customers say about you?

• Most people don't realise how good speech recognition has become as their only experience is Siri (which is very, very good) and they don't realise how general it can be. Try out a demo of Dragon Dictate, or use "Ok, Google" on an Android phone. What would you do differently if you could run your business on spoken information?

• Get a feel for how conversational bots are working. Look at this demo of an agent that schedules meetings: https://meekan.com/hipchat/  . There have some competitors, such as Amy from http://x.ai/ . Do the interactions you have with your customers follow some formulaic approach? How would you do things differently if the initial engagement with your customers was handled by a bot?

• There are generational differences in the way we run businesses (here's a blog post about a very interesting company that I did some work for: http://blog.ifost.org.au/2015/04/gen-y-businesses.html). What are the assumptions you make because you expect to interact via email?

Greg Baker (gregb@ifost.org.au) has worked with numerous startups -- http://www.ifost.org.au/startups/ for a short list -- as a developer, manager and consultant. He also runs mentoring sessions helping entrepreneurs wanting to bootstrap their businesses without venture capital or angel investments.

#AlchemyAPI bought by IBM for #Watson -- it's obvious whom IBM will buy next

Every time I start getting enthusiastic about an artificial intelligence company's products, IBM buys them for Watson.

Last year I blogged about the code I had written to make a Google App Engine mail handler which displayed summaries of emails by keywords and sentiment. Today I've discovered that AlchemyAPI (who provided a lot of the smarts) have just been bought by IBM.

Earlier last year I was working with Cognea (and a few other chatbot companies) trying to get a service desk agent that could outperform human beings at a mega-sized organisation -- where even handling helpdesk text chats and email was a job handled by a large team. The part I was looking after (routing of incident tickets and predicting failed changes) turned into Queckt (AEED).

Yes, well, anyway, Cognea got bought last year too.

So here's my next prediction: IBM buys x.ai. 

Two reasons:

1. I'm a big fan of x.ai's work, so based on past experience they will be bought out by someone sooner or later. If IBM doesn't, someone else will.
2. Lotus has an integrated calendar and mail system. It's in large organisations with busy executives who could be served very well by an (AI) agent who could organise meetings on their behalf. x.ai only need to plug-in a new back-end calendar service and a new fetch-from-a-Domino-server mail client. Then Notes actually has a useful feature that might stop customers slipping away to Google Apps and Office365.

On the other hand, not every company with artificial intelligence products gets bought by IBM. For example, IFOST hasn't. ;-)

Here are some of the things we've done:

• Smart systems monitoring: automatic anomaly detection for events on CPU, memory and I/O; detection of log files without human intervention and then determining which messages are important or trivial; prediction of future capacity exhaustion.
• Intra-oral dental image analysis
• Improving ITIL ticket handling by 30% using vocabulary detection
• Identifying student learning disabilities by timing analysis

Let me know if you are interested in any of these. I'll make sure we're not bought out by IBM!