Seeing data with your tongue.

The last issue of Wired magazine had this fascinating article about how researchers are taking advantage of the plasticity of the brain to use technology to either enhance human senses or to even create totally new ones. For example, they have the story of a person who used a “feelSpace belt” to acquire a sixth sense of direction, like the one that birds have to always know how to fly north or south.

For six weird weeks in the fall of 2004, Udo Wächter had an unerring sense of direction. Every morning after he got out of the shower, Wächter, a sysadmin at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, put on a wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads — the same weight-and-gear modules that make a cell phone judder. On the outside of the belt were a power supply and a sensor that detected Earth’s magnetic field. Whichever buzzer was pointing north would go off. Constantly.

“It was slightly strange at first,” Wächter says, “though on the bike, it was great.” He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. “I finally understood just how much roads actually wind,” he says. He learned to deal with the stares he got in the library, his belt humming like a distant chain saw. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, “I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn’t get lost, even in a completely new place.”

Another fascinating example describes how some researchers are using a device that basically hooks up a camera to a set of tiny electrodes that are attached to the tongue. Visual images are interpreted as electric current against the tongue. When people put on this device and have their vision totally blocked, they can quickly learn to “see” with their tongue. It’s pretty amazing stuff.

This is all based on the fact that our brain has the ability to shift resources around. If the visual cortex is damaged or doesn’t receive information for some reason, the brain can refocus a different part of it to start handling processing of visual information. This is why rehabilitation after a stroke or other major brain damage can restore whatever senses were compromised.

This is very promising when it comes to aiding those who are impaired in some way or even creating “enhanced” humans who can, for example, find their way around no matter where they are. But it also hold promise in a different area: enabling humans to use their senses to understand complex data sets.

Humans have a very hard time interpreting multidimensional data. Give someone a two dimensional table (rows by columns) and they can easily understand the data and make decisions on them. But add a third dimension or a fourth or fifth and it becomes very hard to represent the data in a way that humans can work with. That’s because we depend only on vision to see the data and then on our brain’s capacity to crunch multiple numbers simultaneously, which is a notoriously small capacity.

So, how about bringing in more senses? How about allowing multidimensional data to be perceived not only by sight but also by touch, taste, or even new senses, such as that of direction? Basically I’m talking about creating virtual reality environments where the environment is not a realistic replica of the real world but a representation of a multidimensional data space.

This is science fiction stuff, I know. But if a blind person can go mountain biking simply by clicking his or her tongue and using a sonar-like sense called echolocation (true story), why can’t I see, hear, touch, and taste my way through a complex data space to find solutions or make optimal decisions?

Two important lessons from Google’s rise, or how to get on the cover of Business Week.

Business Week has a very interesting analysis of Google this week, examining whether Google has become too powerful. It’s certainly an astonishing story, that of Google. How a simple search engine could rise in a mere 9 years to one of the largest and richest companies in the world holds many lessons to be learned.

The fist (and my favorite) lesson is of course the one about how information is the gold (or oil) of our time. If you can find a way to produce, sort/search, interpret, or distribute information more efficiently and more effectively than others, you can make a lot of money. Google started out with a better way, developed by Sergey Bin and Larry Page (then of Stanford), of sortin/searching information on the web and they made it available for free. That’s it. Nothing more than that. But it was enough to attract huge numbers of users who were looking for a better and more accurate way of finding information.

Then comes the second lesson: Once you have the loyal audience, find a smart, unobtrusive way to make money from them without charging them for what you’ve already provided for free. So, Google went with advertising. Simple text ads that appear after a search and are relevant to the keywords entered by the user. The rest is history.

Skype did the same thing. They found a more efficient way of distributing information (the audio of phone conversations). They made it available for free. Users flocked to them. Once they had a loyal audience they moved to lesson number two. They started offering value-added services for a small price. By then, they had millions of loyal users and a peer-to-peer network which, by definition, has diminishing to negligible marginal costs as its user base expands (in fact the network’s power grows with each new member). So, even a tiny number of subscribers to those value added services meant big profits for Skype.

So those of you who are entrepreneurial in nature, look around. Can you identify a context in which you or others currently produce, sort/search, interpret, or access information and where at least one of those processes can be improved even marginally? If the answer is yes, put on your thinking caps. A year from today it could be your company on the cover of Business Week.

It’s all about information: The wireless application and service innovators.

Business Week has a special section on wireless technologies this week and as a part of it, they showcase what they call “The New M-Commerce Barons.” They are the new innovators in wireless applications and services. Going over this impressive list of innovations is illuminating in the sense that one can identify the types of opportunities that are available today for creating business value using technology. Some examples:

1. Use information technology to reduce even the slightest time delays in a person’s daily life. Check out Mobo, for example, which allows you to pre-order food using a text message so it’s ready when you get there. For a busy New Yorker, the ability to save 10 minutes of waiting for lunch to be prepared is worth a lot.

2. Provide information, using a simple interface, that is otherwise unavailable or hard to get. Loopt, the brainchild of 21-year-old student, provides the location of your friends with GPS-enabled devices. 4info allows users to send text messages with questions on news, sports, movies and so on. Google also does this very successfully for all kinds of information.

3. Allow people to share information. Call it community building, call it social networking, call it whatever you want. People have always loved to share information, from showing off vacation photos to giving recommendations on restaurants. Eyeka allows users to share photos and video and even sell them to those who want to buy.

4. Piggyback on someone who’s already successful. iSkoot allows users to make Skype phone calls using their cell phones and voice networks. (Jajah already does this without using Skype, by the way)

So, it’s all about information. How you create it, manipulate it, interpret it, distribute it. Find a way to add value to at least one of those processes and you may have an idea for a successful business.

Interestingly enough, Business Week also showcases the latest trends in wireless devices, but compared to the innovations in wireless applications and services, the devices just look downright boring.

Google tests pay-per-action advertising

Today, everybody seems to be talking about Google’s experiment with pay-per-action or cost-per-action advertising (Others, like Turn, are also doing this). Basically, an advertiser would only pay Google if a user clicked on an ad and also performed some pre-determined action on the advertiser’s site (buy a product, register, etc.). There are a lot of arguments in favor of this, including reducing click fraud, since the advertiser will not have to pay for all the fraudulent clicks on their ad.

This makes me a little wary, only because it’s starting to remind me of the beginning of the online advertising craze. Back in the mid-90s when all we had was the simple rectangular banner, everyone got so excited about the ability to click on an ad and be transported to the store, that they started ignoring the other effects of advertising, i.e., getting inside people’s heads even if it doesn’t involve immediate action. So, for a few years, all anyone cared about were clickthroughs. And when those clickthroughs went downhill (because people stopped clicking on ads), they all started to talk about the death of online advertising. Fortunately, others remembered that advertising is not all about direct response but about things like branding. And online advertising started to flourish again.

What we shouldn’t forget as we talk about PPA models, like the one tested by Google, is that for rich media advertising the PPA model doesn’t work. Users don’t click much on rich media ads because they appear on publisher websites where they go to consume information. For example, when I am at the NY Times website, I want to read the articles, not click on an ad and be taken somewhere else. So, what matters most for rich media ads is how much they change customer beliefs and attitudes. It’s not whether users click on them and then buy or register at the site they go to.

It’s ok to be excited about the prospect of PPA advertising but only if we are talking about sponsored search ads. After all, they most often appear after a keyword search at a search engine, when a user wants to click on a link to go somewhere else and do things like buy, register, and so on.