Seward's Folly goes digital

I once fell victim to delicious “brain crack” after dreaming up a pen that would record everything I wrote digitally. “Brain crack,” a term coined by Internet comedian Ze Frank, describes an idea that makes one feel good despite a lack of time or effort invested. My addiction to this idea only ended after I found the same pen in real life (minus the awesome fire decals my imaginary pen had) for sale by the company Livescribe ten minutes later.

“Brain crack” aside, there are thousands of reasons for a developer not to make a dream into a reality. Maybe a solution lacks perfection or could be improved by smarter folk. Innovation isn’t all about coming up with the best idea, or about competing with the biggest dogs, though. Most great ideas seem even stupid from the outset but become great ideas later, like Seward’s Folly.

In the past two weeks, the founders of startups Peek, a mobile device manufacturer, and SpeakerText, both the brainchildren of Columbia alums, came to speak about how they got around these problems. They helped show that even schemes following unconventional wisdom can become great with the proper time and effort invested.

In the crowded Computer Science lounge of Mudd one Friday evening at an Association for Computing Machinery talk, there was a look of hard-earned satisfaction in the face of Peek CEO Amol Sarva, CC ’98. There he stood shuffling two Peek devices in one hand like two Bellagio poker chips, the key to Peek’s future success or failure as a major mobile device company.

Sarva, no newcomer to the world of technological entrepreneurship, had served already as part of the founding team of Virgin Mobile when he started Peek in 2005. In November 2009, Peek released the TwitterPeek, a mobile device that served the singular purpose of sending and receiving Tweets, or short, 140-character messages, from the popular social networking site, Twitter. Initially, the TwitterPeek met harsh criticism, such as one review by Gizmodo titled “The TwitterPeek Is So Dumb It Makes My Brain Hurt” for risking being different than smartphones. But Sarva didn’t seem to mind. With only 15 percent of the U.S. handset market owning smartphones, and more than 80 percent of Twitter users struggling to make Twitter a major form of communication, Sarva found a market that could ostensibly benefit greatly from a cheap, Twitter-only alternative to the smartphone.

At the end of his presentation, Sarva took a question from the crowd regarding the difficulties facing new innovators. Aside from a fear of letting good ideas out, or becoming addicted to “brain crack,” members of the audience were worried about the “Microsoft Problem”: if an idea was really good enough to produce on a large scale, why wouldn’t a company like Microsoft, with seemingly infinite resources, produce it first or produce it better? Sarva found a solution to the Microsoft Problem by tackling problems in unconventional ways and staying away from the sandbox of corporate giants like Microsoft and Google.

Matt Mireles, CC ’08, CEO of SpeakerText and former writer for the Spectator, spoke earlier in the month about the nascent company that he helped co-found. Unlike Sarva, he followed a strategy that flew in the face of the “Microsoft Problem.” Rather than seeking out untapped areas of development, Mireles went up against major companies head-on, developing a product for video and audio transcription to allow for text-based indexing. Like Sarva, Mireles challenged what many would call conventional wisdom. Earlier this November, Google announced automatic captions in YouTube. Dragon NaturallySpeaking has, for a long while, offered software that can transcribe with a fair level of accuracy. Because of this, SpeakerText has had to grow in an area of focus by giant competitors. The risks were great, but Mireles seemed hopeful that the end result would pay off. Given enough time to develop, SpeakerText hoped to transform video indexing as YouTube did video sharing.

Both Peek and SpeakerText demonstrate that, aside from just an initial good idea, a great idea requires some disregard for criticism and conventional wisdom. Undergraduates should tempt their fate by working on new projects while still in college. One new course being offered in the spring for interested students with a taste for entrepreneurship or technology is Principles of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Students whose interests may have been piqued by the stories of Sarva or Mireles would benefit greatly from such a course, and the community of developers that might come along with it.

It might be tough to turn goals into reality, but any scheme is better attempted than kept as “brain crack.” As for me, I’m still recovering from my addiction to my imaginary digital pen. Next time, I’ll be sure to invest some energy into designing an idea before getting too attached to it.

Akiva Bamberger is a Columbia College junior majoring in computer science and mathematics with a pre-medical concentration. He is president of the Association for Computing Machinery. Bits and Pieces runs alternate Wednesdays.
opinion@columbiaspectator.com

Tags: Opinion, Akiva Bamberger, alumni, entrepreneurship, Internet, local entrepreneurs