危 wēi  danger

Google owes much of its success to its phenomenal search algorithm, invented by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were attending Stanford University as Ph.D. candidates.

Broadly, Google search works in three distinct parts:

• Googlebot, a web crawler finds and fetches web pages.
• An indexer sorts every word on every page and stores the resulting index of words in a huge database.
• The query processor compares your search query to the index and uses the algorithm to recommend documents that it considers most relevant.

Google harnesses a distributed network of thousands of computers to parallel process this information.   This approach has proven incredibly effective, with perhaps one major exception: image search.  Image search is less reliable because the indexer mines pages for words and therefore only labels images based on their context (and most images on the web are untagged).  Many companies have tried to build software to interpret images but it’s tough to do  – that’s why identifying unclear letters remains one of the last ways of evidencing that we are in fact human, not machine.

Proof you’re [sort of] smarter than machine:

Although there is clear value in being able to search for images accurately, even Google couldn’t afford to have people complete the labour-intensive task of tagging images one by one.

机 jī opportunity

Google asked a different question  - how can we have consumers do this for free?  Answer: make it a game.  Google licensed ESP gaming technology, originally conceived by Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University and launched Google Image Labeler in 2006 as a beta.

In the game users are paired with another and they compete in tagging images.  The game is great fun: some users reportedly play over 40 hours a week.  The game has enabled the company to ensure that its keywords are matched to correct images, building an accurate database for Google Image Search.

Gaming has great potential for good, other recent examples include Matchin (helping build a database of the web’s most attractive pictures) and Solarstormwatch (helping astronomers spot explosions on the Sun to give astronauts an early warning if dangerous solar radiation is headed their way)

How About…

• Developing a game to harness consumer power economically?
• Applying gaming ideas & principles to your existing offer?

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Here’s a screenshot from the game:

危 wēi  danger

In 1998, after spending a weekend playing games with some friends Richard Tate, a rising star at Microsoft at the time, decided that there was a gap in the market for a board game that used multiple skills.  He was so confident of the opportunity he quit his job and convinced his coworker, Whit Alexander, to join him. Instead of focusing on a general market need the two founders decided to design their game around a “moment,” specifically the moment when players “appear smart and funny in front of family and friends.” Together they designed a novel board game called Cranium – billed as “The Game for Your Whole Brain.” Initial feedback from friends and family was so strong they decided to place an order for 27,000 units from China.  However, with the order delivery date looming the team failed to get their product into the American International Toy Fair and hadn’t managed to sign up a single toy retailer.

机 jī opportunity

While drowning their sorrows in cups of Starbucks the team wondered why they needed traditional toy retailers at all, it struck them that other channels might make more sense, not least Starbucks.  After some persuasion the coffee chain stocked Cranium, the first time they had ever sold such a product and it was an immediate success.  The game went on to be the first board game sold by many other retailers too, including Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com.  Cranium then developed a series of other products, making sure that they stayed true to their brand by remembering the acronym CHIFF (clever, high quality, innovative, friendly, and fun) as their guiding principle.  By developing great new products and selling them through new retail channels the company has sold over 22 million games – making it the third largest games company in the world.  Whit and Richard sold out to Hasbro in 2008 for $75m…

How About…

• Optimising products or services around an important “moment”?
• Distilling your brand down to its DNA to help choose brand extensions wisely (acronym optional)?
• Questioning traditional channels, instead asking yourself where your target customers tend to congregate?

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