Startup Ideas Blog

Some 70 years ago, the trucking and shipping industries were revolutionized by a seemingly simple but radical idea: the shipping container, which was a standardized box that reduced loading and unloading expenses by 90 percent. Today, the industry is going through no less dramatic of a revolution, also driven by a box. Only this time the box is small and ...

Close your eyes, and imagine a time in the not-so-distant past. A time when technology finally made the leap from research facility to the living room. When the future vision of what daily life would become started to include a lot more robots. That time was called the 1970’s, and it was magical. It introduced a whole new concept in ...

In a study out of the University of Pennsylvania, a linguist found that on average one out of every 60 words uttered is “um” or “uh.” In a world where our interactions with technology are fully conversational, computers have to understand people’s language imperfections and word-fumbles. We’re not there yet. But we are in the midst of a fascinating paradigm ...

We’re often told that if you want to move forward, don’t dwell on the past. Rather learn from it and live in the present since the past can’t be changed. Yet more often than not, people find themselves getting lost in their past experiences; the idealized versions of their memories both good and bad. Here at Timehop, we obviously see ...

How artificial intelligence is being used to hire new talent is a trend I explored in a previous essay. In that piece, I briefly noted the apprehension some companies have to fully integrate AI into their recruiting processes, partly due to concerns that machines lack interpretative skills when it comes to judging character. No doubt these skills are already being ...

In today’s digital era, around 90 percent of the data collected internationally has been generated in just a few years. Unstructured data, such as human language, account for about 80 percent of what’s collected. A scant half percent of the data collected is actually analyzed, because a great portion is inaccurate, becomes old and outdated, or is difficult to act ...

When a person thinks about artificial intelligence (AI), they might visualize Terminator, the iconic 80’s film starring futuristic sentient robots. More than three decades later, we’re starting to see a world that is both invigorating and frightening as machines become increasingly self-aware. AI has gone from Hollywood screens to many aspects of our lives, including the hiring process where millions ...

It’s hard to imagine calling your health insurer to receive medical tips, much less sympathy for your ailments and ever-increasing premiums. They’re perceived as faceless, paper-pushing middlemen whose role isn’t to inform you on treatments to receive, doctors to see, or whether acetaminophen is better than ibuprofen.

Over the last two decades, consumers have become accustomed to convenience, variety and doorstep delivery: the modern-day shopping paradigm ushered in by Amazon. From books, to shoes, to fresh bananas; the dominant face of retail sells 480 million products online, leading many of us to ponder the purpose, value and hence the fate of brick-and-mortar stores.  Well, they are not going anywhere!

Digital video consumption has surged, igniting new monetization opportunities for these modern distribution outlets and content makers, a point I explored in a previous essay. The challenge I didn’t touch on, however, is how to optimize these monetization events in the most efficient manner. Machine learning is at the root of the answer.

We’re experiencing a global explosion of personal content, a deluge of digital data that’s partially curated, deleted or in the case of moments that often really matter -- lost in the ceaseless current of photos and videos.  Consumers only have so much time to collect, and more importantly highlight, their important memories. Photos sent to social media represent a very incomplete picture of our lives, even though 350 million photos are uploaded each day on Facebook.

It’s hard to imagine a world where advertising is perfectly targeted to know exactly how you feel and what you need or want. If it were to happen, we may find it incredibly creepy and encroaching of our privacy as there’s a yin and yang about data we want to share. Still, people do share; their preferences are increasingly known; their behavior is teased out to lead them to act. Content marketing is the reason a lot of this is happening.  

When Snap made headlines last year for surpassing Facebook’s video viewership, its achievement of the 10-billion-video-views-per-day milestone underscored not only Snap’s staying power, but the growing importance of video to social media.  What will be interesting to see is if this is a winner-takes-all match, or one where each of the players decides to own a different corner of the ring.