http://video.google.com/

[yesthattom]

http://video.google.com/

I have to say that one of the coolest things about working for Bell Labs in the 90s was seeing amazing technology before anyone else. However, the worst part of working at Bell Labs was seeing that technology and knowing that it would never see the light of day because management couldn’t get their heads out of their asses and figure out how to market it.

Google Video is an almost exact duplicate of a project some of my users developed in the mid-90s. I hear that Google Labs is hiring old Bell Labs people left and right. I wonder if they’re all just ‘re-inventing’ all the old stuff that Bell Labs couldn’t turn into a product.

I know that’s what I would do if I was sitting on a career of amazing products that never saw the light of day. The hardest part would be to decide which to productize under the Google Labs name first.

Comments

[stitchinthyme.livejournal.com]

Doesn't that violate non-disclosure/intellectual property agreements or something?

Video Search

[benjyfeen.livejournal.com]

Dunno if it'll make you feel any better, but...

A couple years ago I met a guy on a plane who worked for BBN. They were working on a project for NTK (Japanese TV) to index their video archives. I think the project he was talking about was actually doing speech recognition, not just scraping closed captioning.

Since the Google Video release, I've heard a few people mention that they'd seen or worked on similar projects over the years. I think it was one of those good ideas that needed a launchpad.

And besides, you just *know* they were doing it at Xerox PARC in the early 80's ;)

Re: violation of NDAs, California's not so much a place where those things get battled. Patents, yes, but good ideas in individual people's heads, not so much.

[publius-ovidius.livejournal.com]

God that's painful. At one company I worked for, we were building this amazing technology where any type of product could be described, regardless of the number and type of attributes. For example, if someone needed to specify what material their stuff was made out of, we could add that directly to the database and it would be instantly searchable and all similar products could instantly gain a "material" attribute if necessary. It connected the manufacturer, the retailer and the consumer directly in an end-to-end chain, allowed manufacturers instant access to their inventory levels, retailers could build custom catalogs on the fly with the proper images and only the products they stocked (and have the catalogs ready for printing, too.)

It was also fast, dirt-cheap, and had huge industry support (they were begging us to get it done.) So why did no one ever see it? It was right after the dot-com crash and everyone was terrified of technology. No one in the industry wanted to foot the bill unless everyone did and but special interests were holding out demanding we make custom features benefiting them. Investors didn't understand how crippled today's product management tools are, so it was a tough sell to them.

Today that product is sitting half-finished on a few hard-drives and the last of the lawsuits is winding down. I woulda been rich, damn it. But then, so many people thought that :/

Re: Video Search

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

I'd actually be very curious to know how many ex-BBN folks have ended up at Google Labs. BBN was right up there with Bell Labs and Xerox in terms of developing amazing technologies that were never turned into products... the PINpaper project in particular is so up Google's alley that I'm surprised they haven't already bought the IP from whoever's sitting on it now.

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

I was looking at the Google Insider list this afternoon, to demonstrate to some UK friends what comes of USA stock ownership disclosure laws. I was amused to see the names of some people I know, including this fellow.

I know well what being on that list means: anyone with curiosity and a browser can get a notion of your net worth, and there are lots of calls from "investment managers" who have a hot stock to sell you, ala Boiler Room.