Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone recently launched the Jelly app, which is based on photo-sharing and learning. Jelly is designed to help people upload pictures of things they don’t recognize, or don’t know the names of, in the hopes that someone else out there will. Users can add context to their images by cropping them, zooming in and adding annotations to them within the app.
When a user uploads an image, such as one trying to identify a type of plant, notifications are submitted to people in their social networks and the user will also be notified when they get an answer.
Stone was inspired to create the Jelly app based on the idea of a social network-powered search engine. Search engines have answers for all sorts of questions, but this one uses pictures as the basis for its queries.
Key Themes Behind This Trend
- Socially-connected Search Engines
- Disruptive innovation opportunity: Develop a search engine that uses pictures as the basis for queries, allowing users to upload images to get answers.
- Photo-sharing and Learning
- Disruptive innovation opportunity: Create a platform that combines photo-sharing with educational features, enabling users to upload pictures of things they want to learn about.
- Crowdsourced Image Recognition
- Disruptive innovation opportunity: Build an app that utilizes crowd intelligence to help users identify and describe unknown objects or items through image recognition technology.
Where This Applies
- Social Networking
- Disruptive innovation opportunity: Use the power of social networks to create a new type of search engine that leverages user-generated content for queries.
- Education Technology
- Disruptive innovation opportunity: Integrate photo-sharing and learning features into educational platforms, allowing users to visually explore and learn about various subjects.
- Artificial Intelligence
- Disruptive innovation opportunity: Develop advanced image recognition algorithms that can be used in various industries, such as retail, healthcare, and security.
