Ian On The Red Dot

There is already one similarity between the search engine which will win A*STAR’s competition to find a next-generation multimedia search engine. Their first funding will be of the same amount - USD$100,000.

From Google’s corporate information page:

Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, was used to taking the long view. One look at their demo and he knew Google had potential – a lot of potential. But though his interest had been piqued, he was pressed for time. As Sergey tells it, “We met him very early one morning on the porch of a Stanford faculty member’s home in Palo Alto. We gave him a quick demo. He had to run off somewhere, so he said, ‘Instead of us discussing all the details, why don’t I just write you a check?’ It was made out to Google Inc. and was for $100,000.”

I think this is where the similarities end.

I’m a strong believer that the nature of the beginning of any endeavor will have a strong influence on, if not determine, the outcome of that endeavor.

While Gandhi was probably not referring to the endeavors of science or business when he made this quote, I find it apt with regards to what A*STAR is trying to do. Gandhi’s quote:

The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree.

I believe that starting a business and developing a technology are two different things and their beginnings thus should not be the same and their paths should not be combined as one.

When starting a business, there are some things you should or rather could do.  You identify a market.  You understand the current market and its limitations.  You spot a potential gap between demand and the supply to meet the demand.  You plan on how to fill the gap.  You start a business to address the gap.

This approach is an objective-oriented approach to starting a business - you decide on where you want to be and then work backwards planning on how to get there.

Reading A*STAR’s press release on the competition, this is what I understand.  The current search engines have limited capabilities in searching multimedia material online.  They rely on metadata associated with video and audio to provide relevant search results.  So, there is additional work that needs to be done in the supplying of metadata.  There is potential for disruption in this area of search if there is a search engine that can understand the multimedia material themselves.  This competition is to spur the development of such technology.

As usual, this is the objective-oriented approach that Singapore is famous for.

Then, there is the Google way.  Reading about their history on Wikipedia, we learn that Google began as a research project to explore the World Wide Web and understand its link structure as a huge graph.  Google didn’t begin as a company to create disruptive technology.  It started as a company to understand something already in existence.  From that research to understand came the theories which led to the disruptive technology in search that made Google the business it is.

I won’t be presumptuous to suggest that there is only one way that disruptive technology can come about.  What I would like to question is the effectiveness of making finding disruptive technology an objective.

Like someone once said, there is no happiness in forcing something to happen.

Two things before I go.  There is already a company that is involved in video search and making waves with their technology.  It is Blinkx and this is the New York Times coverage of that company.

The last thing is to highlight another disruptive technology called ‘tagging’ which basically changed the way we looked at how information can be organized online.   Technology Review (published by MIT) has an article on how Joshua Schachter founded del.icio.us - by starting with writing an application just to help himself manage his own bookmarked links.

I’ve also been thinking about how we as Singaporeans react to the news generated by our organizations such as A*STAR.  It is one thing to go ‘WTF were they thinking’ and laugh at them and then stop.  It’s another thing to go on and try to understand how things could be different and hopefully better.  And then it’s another thing to actually make it better.