Results

Leave it to Louis Rossetto, the co-founder of Wired magazine, to understand that a great user experience goes beyond smooth, easy interactions with your customers, and extends all the way to every facet of your company—operations, employees, culture, even your physical space.

TCHO, Rosetto’s new chocolate manufacturing company, is poised to take the culinary world by storm—all because their passion for their work is palpable in everything they do.  Not only that, Rossetto and his partners married their passion for chocolate with a deep understanding of technology and a fervor for fair trade and corporate responsibility that borders on the religious.  Their factory, located on Pier 17 in San Francisco, is a model of technical transparency and sustainability; consisting chiefly of recycled and refurbished chocolate manufacturing machinery mated with modern process control, information, and communications systems.  Further, they are committed to being exemplary corporate citizens, going “beyond” Fair Trade to help cacao farmers escape commodity production to become premium producers.

But that, as they say, is only part of the story.  TCHO’s real differentiator is the degree to which they seek their customers’ input in order to shape and craft their products.  Taking a cue from software development, TCHO “beta tests” limited production runs of its chocolate.  Test runs are available on the company’s site, and they come packaged plainly, giving customers no preconceived notions about the chocolate they contain.  TCHO then solicits feedback—via its site—on each specific production run, thereby giving it incredible insight on what types of chocolate do and do not appeal to their customers.

TCHO even gives their customers a new way of speaking about chocolate—a new taxonomy whereby chocolate itself is not expressed in terms of percentage of cacao, as is used by most of the chocolate industry, but in simple flavor terms, as one would describe a wine.  TCHO describes chocolate in terms of chocolatey, citrus, fruity, floral, earthy, and nutty.

Finally, the Web 2.0 coup de grâce:  building community.  TCHO’s factory will soon contain a tasting room “as gracious as a European Grand Café,” where customers can sample TCHO’s chocolates and drinks.  Those outside of San Francisco can experience the TCHO brand via their site, which includes a company blog, a multimedia tour of their factory, and suggestions for creating new rituals for sharing chocolate with your friends.

Who says you can’t marry web concepts like the user experience with a bricks-and-mortar business like manufacturing?  TCHO seems to have figured it out—look for them to dominate their industry in the near future.

According to the Wall Street Journal this week, the recent failure of investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., along with the collapse and subsequent take-over of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America, represents the greatest restructuring to the banking industry since the Great Depression.  Out of all this confusion, who’s poised to come out on top?

After the dust settles, commercial banks will emerge atop the ash heap of the financial industry—according to the Journal.  This, in turn, should alter the way the banking industry goes about its business, abandoning the riskier investment banking model for the more conservative, traditional commercial banking model.  And as the pendulum swings more towards commercial banks, commercial banks, in turn, will be competing with each other for more and more customers.

Up until 1999, the Glass-Steagall Act maintained a solid wall between commercial banks and investment banks.  Glass-Steagall was a child of the Great Depression; to protect depositors, it prevented commercial banks from participating in investment banking.  So commercial banks concentrated instead on taking deposits and make loans, earning conservative returns under heavy regulation by state and federal governments.  Investment banks, meanwhile, were not subject to the same regulations as commercial banks.  And since they did not take deposits, they developed other forms of creative capital-gathering to make loans and investments.  Thus, they were more susceptible to market variations and interruptions than their commercial bank counterparts, but the profits they could reap were staggering.  In 1999, Glass-Steagall was repealed, and the wall between commercial banking and investment banking disappeared.

As commercial banks began to compete with investment banks, investment banks—lacking the deposits their commercial banks could rely upon—developed more and more creative financial products in order to keep pace in the new marketplace.  But then, the bubble burst; the housing and credit markets came tumbling back to Earth, and these creative financial products became worthless.  With no real equity to fall back upon, the investment banks were left holding the bag, and began failing.  Commercial banks, with the equity provided by their deposits, were on firmer ground.

But even as commercial banks emerge victorious in the banking industry, more and more of them will now have to compete for deposits from the same customers in order to remain competitive.  In the digital age, how can commercial banks come out on top?  Technology.

Broadband, WiFi, and mobile computing have made online retail banking not merely a nice feature, but a hardcore requirement.  Commercial banks that don’t offer their customers an engaging, holistic online banking experience, including the ability to pay bills, will soon find themselves behind in the digital age.  As more and more banks compete for customers in the digital age, the user experience of their online offerings is going to be the key to success.

You have your work life and your home life, and unless you are one of those mythical beasts whose vocation is their avocation, or you are independently wealthy and can afford not to work, never the twain shall meet.  For most of us, work and life seem to share an inverse relationship; a mutually exclusive, zero-sum game where you can’t get ahead in one without falling behind in the other.  Nobody wants to be the dorky dad tapping away on the Blackberry during his son’s little league game, but when it means putting food on the table or hitting the bread line, there you go—if you don’t tap away, little league is going to be the least of your worries.

Long ago the oracles told us that technology would make things as quaint as a cubicle and as oddly antique as a commute things of the past.  But these were the same oracles that told us we’d be flying around in jet cars by now—jet cars run on water or typical household garbage.  And so those fanciful predictions of old about our work habits are just that—garbage.  The American work ethic simply won’t permit it.

More like the American work ethic simply hasn’t grasped the true power of technology.  The paradigm is two steps behind the curve.  The reason for this?  Face time.

Much of American corporate management is still stuck on the notion that only one thing guarantees results:  time plus physical presence.  By results, I mean productive work, and by time plus physical presence, I mean workers present and accounted for in cubicles—veal pens—for the maximum number of waking hours per day.  Tie in a commute to and from the salt mine to the suburbs, and it’s easy to see how for most people, the work life beats the home life handily—almost academically.  After all, there are only so many hours in the day.

Time + Physical Presence = Results.  Theoretically understandable, yes, but almost laughable when you see it on paper—or in pixels—because it seems so old-fashioned.  Today’s technology is ubiquitous, especially today’s communication technology.  If you can’t be productive with a modern set of gadgets, you might be hastening your own obsolescence—a hunter and gatherer in a business world dominated by information workers.

So why, then, hasn’t technology given us a Norman Rockwell or Leave it to Beaver lifestyle?

Face time accounts for a large chunk of the reason.  Unfortunately, in the corporate world, perception is still paramount—paramount more, perhaps, than production itself.  If your boss is of a certain age, or a certain mindset, it just looks bad to him, or her, if you’re not in your cube when he—or she—walks by . . . it’s no more complicated than that.  And if the guy in the next cubicle is there when the boss walks by, it just looks better for him that he’s there and you’re not—even if you get more done in five hours than that guy gets done in forty.

Here’s the conundrum in a nutshell:  this April, Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio eliminated a decades-old Ohio policy of flex time for its workers.  Why?  Because one Friday afternoon, Hugh Quill, the director of the department of administrative services, noticed that many employees were not at their desks.  So in the name of greater productivity, and greater customer service, Strickland killed the program, thereby forcing government employees to spend more time actually sitting at their desks.
I wonder if Strickland ever considered the link between physical presence and productivity, or physical presence and good customer service.  Obviously, it seems he took it for granted that both were possible only via physical presence.

But we know, instinctively, that this is not the case.

Before instituting his new policy, Strickland should have asked himself three questions:  What does good productivity look like?  What does good customer service look like?  Can I use technology to help me achieve what I want?

Clearly, Governor Strickland missed an opportunity to use technology to make life better for both his employees and his customers—the taxpayers of Ohio.  After all, most people interact with government to get things done.  To perform transactions, in other words; routine, everyday transactions that enable them to then forget all about the government and get on with their business.

Today’s technology—especially rich internet applications (RIAs)—are incredibly adept at performing transactions of the type that used to be performed exclusively by government customer service agents.  Instead of issuing a face time decree, Strickland could have, instead, invested in designing, building, and supporting web-based tools that allowed his customers—both his employees and the taxpayers of Ohio—to perform transactions that didn’t require a live government employee on one end of the line.  And not only that:  he could have invested in designing, building, and supporting web-based applications that helped his employees communicate in order to work better.  Don’t forget—employees are customers, too.

A RIA solution, designed with the user experience in mind, could have delighted Strickland’s employees and the taxpayers of Ohio at the same time.  Taxpayers would have been able to perform government transactions when they wanted to, when they needed to—beyond the traditional office hours of business.  And with RIAs supporting their work activities, the government employees could have been more productive even when not physically at their desks.  RIAs could have helped them keep their flex time.  After all, RIAs don’t have families.  They don’t give a fig about the work/life balance.

In his seminal 1964 work Understanding Media:  The Extensions of Man,  communications theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message.”  Simply put, McLuhan believed that the way a message is conveyed to an audience is just as important as the message itself.

Take, for example, the Democrat and Republican national conventions.  Both conventions, of course, are highly-staged affairs, meant to appeal to mass television audiences.  But the way the stages—the sets themselves—are designed is meant to convey certain subliminal messages about the candidates as well.  So when a candidate is addressing the convention audience, and the television audience as well, not only is he delivering a message via words, but via subtle—or not so subtle—visual clues as well.

This week the New York Times analyzed the messages they believed each party wished to convey about its candidate via stage design.  According to the Times, the Democrats’ stage was very horizontal, with a short background, in order to make the crowd look bigger.  The backdrop made use of a variety of different media, on several large video screens, thereby conveying different points of view that all converged on a single speaker at the podium—a sort of unification, if you will.  And during Obama’s acceptance speech, the backdrop featured a row of windows in the Greek Revival style—Washington’s prevailing form of architecture—thereby firmly placing Obama in a seemingly-official Washington setting.

The Republicans’ set, in contrast, was minimal, which, according to the Times, “seem(ed) to induce a low-keyed sentimental attachment to a sort of old-fashioned American nationalism.”  According to experts—again, according to the Times—the simple set was meant to convey the notion that McCain has simple tastes, and is himself a straightforward man.  However, the set also featured a 50 by 30 foot video screen in back of the podium, allowing whatever image they displayed on the screen to dwarf the speaker—perhaps intimating that the image itself was more important than the particular speaker delivering the message.   The speaking podium was low to the ground—the lowest ever at a convention—which meant convey the notion that McCain “want(ed) to present to everyone . . . that he’s not a lot of glitz and flashing lights . . . represent(ing) his very open and down to earth personality.”

While McLuhan probably could not have predicted the impact his theory would have vis-à-vis the web as a form of mass market communication, we can readily see how it rings true when it comes to usability and the user experience.  Just as set designers attempt to influence the attitudes of television viewers by utilizing a multitude of visual clues, web designers attempt to influence the attitudes of users by architecting information in engaging ways.  After all, web content is nothing if it is not usable; web content is practically irrelevant if it does not engage and motivate users.  Sadly, McLuhan did not live to see the advent of the web, but his message is just as applicable to it as it was to the mass communication mediums of his day—movies, television, radio, and print.

As internet usage and computers are now a natural, integrated part of our lives, we take if for granted the myriad of clicks and sites we visit to perform even simple tasks. Rather than using normal language commands, we interact with websites, email clients, social networks, and even mapping applications the same way. We copy and paste, send links, and type specialized commands or truncated keywords to do almost everything.

Mozilla wants to connect our online lives with our natural language usage with a new platform called Ubiquity. A Mozilla Labs release, Ubiquity is already attracting a lot of attention from users. Mozilla explains the experiment this way:

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:

• Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
• Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
• Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
• Extend the browser functionality easily.

The concept of adapting mashup technology to everyday tasks is a fascinating idea. It could eliminate the need for links, copying and pasting, and even sending text emails. The example Mozilla gives is of sending an email to a friend to invite them to a new restaurant. You could include the address, reviews, a menu, and even a map within the body of an email, without having to simply link to them.

Ubiquity is being tested as an add-on to Firefox 3 browser, Mozilla’s most successful project. It is fully open source and free, so any developers can access the original code and customize it for various usages. Ubiquity 0.1 allows users to insert maps anywhere, translate on-page, search many content and portal sites, add items to Digg and update twitter, get weather reports, and many more. Users will be able to type commands in a bar similar to the address bar on a search engine, but instead of typing keywords you can type commands. The platform also lets users “teach” it new commands through a subscription service. A tutorial is available to teach new users how Ubiquity will function.

With Mozilla as a leader, other applications will start to follow this trend towards creating natural, language-based interfaces. We may even see voice commands become integrated into our internet browsers, letting our speech fulfill the same function as our fingers and keyboards do now. As with all Mozilla Labs projects, Ubiquity is free and ready to be tweaked and customized for any user. As one user raves about Ubiquity on Mozilla’s blog, “Nice work, I hope there’s enough developer interest in this to bring this to the top of the popular plug-ins!”

Many companies have enacted policies regarding employees’ web use, but with every banned site comes an added challenge: how do you enforce these policies? Comprehensive and costly software packages are the answer for large organizations, but even these often fall short of expectations. They cannot necessarily be scaled or customized for different types of users. Smaller businesses often lack the means to enforce web browsing policies at all.

As with many other forms of software, web filtering services are making their way to the cloud. A Silicon Valley-based start up called Zscaler is tapping into the power of web-based software to provide monitoring services for top companies like The Weather Channel and NetApp. However, the appeal of products like Zscaler extends far beyond companies with large, diverse staffs. IDC analyst Brian Burke said in a Zscaler press release, “SaaS is ideal for large corporations with dozens of Internet gateways, where deploying traditional point products is very expensive. It is a good fit for small businesses, which do not have enough IT staff.”

The idea is to provide more value which is easy for any business to manage. Zscaler’s website enumerates a four-tiered approach:

• Enforce business policy and mitigate risk
• Protect end-users from Web-based threats and malware
• Empower organizations with the right access to the right users
• Twice the functionality at half the price

The unique platform works by utilizing a number of interconnected servers to monitor incoming and outbound HTTP traffic from any given client’s employees. Data is collected and scrubbed from both sides, ensuring the safety of any interactions as well as the maintenance of company policy. As Zscaler’s website explains, “Web traffic leaving the customer’s firewall is automatically redirected to one of Zscaler data centers, where user policy is enforced. Web pages returning from the Internet are inspected to ensure that only clean traffic is returned to the user.” The “clean traffic” refers to malware and spybots, both of which are a source of major headaches for IT departments.

In addition, Zscaler can be set up on a per user basis, and they offer a free trial version so clients can check it out before buying. While marketing staff may need access to YouTube, the accounting team probably does not. Salespeople might keep track of contacts on social networks, but customer service representatives could be cut off from their Facebook access. The rules could also be applied across the board, such as a universal block on World of Warcraft. Additionally, since the software is hosted and managed on cloud computers, crafty IT techs would not be able to circumvent or alter the rules for themselves or friends.

A recent profile of Zscaler in the New York Times points out one of the most innovative features of the web-based software: “If Zscaler does not recognize a Web site, it can analyze pages on the fly with technology called “dynamic content classification.” So an employee does not necessarily have to be at YouTube for his employer to know he is viewing Web video when he should be cranking out that spreadsheet.” By adding smart controls to the SaaS service, employers can ensure that mirror sites are also off-limits.

By moving this type of software to the web, it gives the average employer much more control in trying to curb employee web surfing behavior. A program hosted on outside servers, while subject to outages and unexpected changes, prevents employees from circumventing company policy. Some have questioned the privacy issues involved with SaaS filtering services. Even the New York Times article wryly remarks, “it’s [the cloud’s] going to watch your every move online and tattle to your boss.”

That being said, anyone who expects web surfing privacy on a work computer is unrealistic. Our on-the-clock time belongs to our employers, and Zscaler simply found a convenient, inexpensive, dynamic, and frankly a little scary way to ensure we’re on task.

As the online, communal encyclopedia becomes a standard tool for students and the curious all over the world, the good folks at Wikipedia are struggling to deal with vandalism. Since anyone is allowed to view and edit material on Wikipedia articles, this makes it difficult to police the accuracy and ensure the quality of content. With the German version of Wikipedia leading the way, the affiliated sites will begin testing an approval system for edits made by users.

Validation and vandalism has been a major bone of contention among Wikipedia users and founders for some time. At the Wikimania 2006 conference, talks were held about the best way to validate edits to Wikipedia articles. Some proposed a 3-step process for validating current articles:

1. A stable version of an article would be tagged as usable and unvandalized.

2. A validated version. The stable version would be fact-checked (using m:Wikicite?) by a team of subject experts, probably from the trusted members of the appropriate WikiProject. This might involve temporarily protecting the page from edits during the validation, or alternatively a short-lived fork would be needed. After the work is completed this version of the article would be made visible and tagged as an uneditable validated version. Any user could look at links from this validated version to see exactly what source was used to check a particular fact.

3. Independent review. An outside expert, with a reputation in the field, would check that the validated article was balanced, up-to-date and complete, then sign off to say that they approve of the article. See the Blessings project.

These steps could help stem the flow of vandalism to the site, increasing the accuracy and academic validity of the content. As the Wikipedia article about the proposal argues, “Even if we could just reach stage 2 [validated version] on a core of 1000-2000 articles, this would be a great step towards giving Wikipedia credibility among librarians and academics.” Indeed, many universities do not allow students to cite Wikipedia as a source on research papers because of the questionable quality of its user authors. An approval system, implemented by subject matter experts, could change this stance.

Wikipedia’s German site has been testing a validation process called “flagged revisions.” It acts as an extension to the software behind Wikipedia, and notifies administrators when a change is being made. A fact checker will verify that the new entry or change is accurate, then approve the changes. While this process is being done, users on the site will see the most recently verified version of an article.

According to a recent New York Times article, “Approximately 60 percent of the more than 750,000 German articles have been checked, and thus are under watch in the future. There are approximately 3,000 checkers, though Mathias Schindler, one of the administrators of German Wikipedia, says he expects the numbers to grow, since the only requirement is that someone have made a total of 300 edits, none of them vandalism.” Rather than hiring full-time fact checkers, the site will rely on expert users in good standing to verify changes.

If a similar validation system is put in place for the English-language site, Wikipedia has the chance to boost its reputation as an educational tool. By utilizing active, reliable users for fact checking, Wikipedia can maintain its user-generated feel without sacrificing the quality of its content.

Yahoo! has launched BOSS, (Build your Own Search Service), an open-source version of their search engine technology.  BOSS offers developers all the power with none of the trademarked hassles of traditionally outsourced search engine technology.  Developers are able to tweak the code, create mashups and generate eye-catching, relevant results.  Could Yahoo!’s approach to the search engine battle be the move that evens the playing field?
 
As Yahoo! BOSS website explains, “BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!’s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS is a platform for the next generation of search innovation, serving hundreds of millions of users across the Web.”  While most traditional search engine sites return thousands upon thousands of results, the average viewer usually stops looking after three or four pages of returns.  Yahoo! BOSS allows developers to scale back the returns and adjust the ranking and sorting structure to more specifically fit the needs of the web page the customized search engine sits on.
 
So far, the results are amazing.  Initial launch partners, Hakia and Me.dium have already created site specific search models for their companies.  Hakia is taking a semantic view of tuning up search engine results to bring back what it emphasizes as “quality results.”  Hakia’s website explains a “quality result satisfies three criteria simultaneously: It (1) comes from credible sources (verticals) recommended by librarians, (2) is the most recent information available, and (3) is absolutely relevant to the query.” 

Me.dium offers a social search engine tool that bases its returns off what pages are getting the most hits by real people, or CrowdRank.  “We calculate CrowdRank by combining the recent activity a page has received, how connected that URL is to other related URLs (as measured by the activity of the crowds), and any change in recent activity that the URL might be experiencing (which we call Velocity),” says Me.dium’s FAQ sheet.
 
Yahoo! BOSS promises two things: openness and customization.  According to a TechCrunch write up, Yahoo! BOSS is so open it will even work with competitor Google App Engine.  Demonstrating the ease and elegance of Yahoo! BOSS, lead engineer Vik Singh created a mashup that combines the two products into a functioning app using only 50 lines of code.  That’s great, but what about the average Joe programmer?  Well, according to www.javarants.com site owner Sam Pullara, the new Yahoo! BOSS API is so tight, you can craft something like www.4hoursearch.com  “It took 4 hours to write the initial code, 4 hours for it to go from unknown to 20 hits / second, 4 hours looking for a domain name and 4 hours to build the brand new UI.  Fortunately, it won’t take 4 hours to find something with it  ,” Pullara posts.  It would appear Yahoo! BOSS delivers on both fronts.
 
Often times, the best way to beat a larger, stronger opponent is by using their own strength against them.  Google’s share of the search engine market is significantly bigger than Yahoo!’s.  But if Yahoo! can enable an entire world of developers to create their own style of search engine by opening up their code, Google will have more to worry about.  Once a solid monetization strategy is announced, the threat to Google will become more tangible.  Investor’s would be wise to keep an eye on search engine usage statistics in the upcoming quarters.  Any slip in Google’s numbers will indicate that the Yahoo! BOSS students of today may become the search engine masters of tomorrow.

While buzz about the project has been circulating for some time, Google’s long-awaited Knol was greeted with little fanfare when it officially launched in beta earlier this month. It’s being described as a hybrid of Wikipedia and Squidoo, with a little dash of blogging. Knol aims to give experts in many fields the opportunity to publish articles, or “knols,” on any topic under the sun. But will this new site have any chance of competing with well-established rivals?

Wikipedia has become a site daily-visited by many internet users. One can find out the population of Malaysia, the name of that one actor in that one movie, or the various types of cheeses made from sheep’s milk. In some ways,Wikipedia’s success has encroached upon Google’s goal of indexing and making available all the world’s information. The site allows anyone to edit or tweak articles on a topic, and has sometimes been questioned as inaccurate. However, Wikipedia has yet to be challenged by smaller rivals in the online encyclopedia realm.

Knol is arguably Google’s first foray into content creation. Topics of knols include diverse subjects such as beauty product ingredients, whale watching in Maui, and herbal diabetes treatements. While users are doing the actual work of building up a store of “knols” (units of knowledge in article form), Google gets the benefit of directing search traffic to Knol articles based on keywords. A recent ReadWriteWeb article points out the possible dangers of this strategy: “Specifically, the issue with Knol is: how much Google tunes their search algorithm to favor Knol content vs alternative content on the same subject? This is where Google could be crossing the line. This is not so far from Microsoft bundling Explorer in order to beat Netscape.”

On the flip side, Knol could provide a serious forum for subject matter experts to publish their writings. Knol’s website, in explaining how the system works, points out this side benefit for authors. “The authors of the knols can take credit for their writing, provide credentials, and elicit peer reviews and comments. Users can provide feedback, comments, and related information.” Google is giving article authors a level of visibility and recognition that is not available on Wikipedia. Anyone can write a knol, and Google promises not to edit or change it to “enforce any particular viewpoint,” provided that it doesn’t violate the Terms of Service or Content Policy.

One way in which Knol will differ dramatically from Wikipedia is that Google will allow more than one author to tackle the same subject. The FAQ section explains, “If you do a search on a topic, you may very well see more than one knol in the search results.” Wikipedia, on the other hand, allows anyone to make changes to a given article to avoid duplication. This could give Google an advantage when it comes to search results.

The greatest advantage, of course, is the search technology behind Knol. Not only will Google index knols (potentially to the detriment of competitors), but the site itself has a powerful search tool for internal use. If your search returns few or no results, Knol prompts users to “search again allowing more matches”. If too many results are irrelevant, users can “search again allowing fewer matches.”

As the number of Knol articles increases, these functions could give users a valid reason to abandon Wikipedia. At present, however, Wikipedia’s active community makes for a vastly larger pool of information. Google’s ability to promote and increase the content on Knol will be the test which determines which encyclopedic site wins this battle.

Memorization is a key part of learning something new. Most often we rely on our memories for knowledge we have learned in the past whether it is through life experiences or studying. With a software program called SuperMemo, a user can rely on the science of long-term memory to learn. SuperMemo is a computer program for Windows, Windows CE, and Palm Pilot. It can be explored from Internet, DOS, Linux, Mac, and Amiga as well.

SuperMemo is based on the idea that there is an ideal moment to practice what you have learned. As a Wired.com article explains, “Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget.” However, the time for when people are about to forget is different for everyone.

The program helps a user create collections of facts and remembers pieces of information that the user learns and wants to memorize. The program then tests how well the user memorizes those facts and bits of information. This essentially shows how much the user has learned, and how long the process took. At the same time, it collects information about the user’s retention rate.

SuperMemo then notifies the user the best time for reviewing information for him/her. The program identifies the pattern of the review and repetition of information in the user’s memory. It differentiates between what the user has learned and what the he/she has not learned. This increases efficiency of learning for the user because it saves time. The user will know what pieces of information to spend more time on and which ones he/she already knows. He/she won’t have to waste time on trying to learn information that has already been retained. The process of memorization is sped up.

The man behind SuperMemo is Piotr Wozniak, a Polish programmer who has implemented the algorithm behind his invention in every aspect of his life. In Wired.com’s recent profile of Wozniak, it is clear he has turned his mind into a laboratory for testing his theories. Independently of mainstream scientists and psychologists, Wozniak determined that human forgetfulness and memorization is patterned. Humans forget exponentially, and Wozniak was able calculate and exploit the point at which a person forgets.

SuperMemo, at the height of its success, was being sold (and pirated) all over the world. It is ideal for language learning, much of which is based on memorizing vocabulary. Wozniak, who has never visited an English-speaking country, has mastered the language using his software and his memorization theory. Students in Poland now use SuperMemo to study for language proficiency exams that would enable them to study abroad.

While the brain fitness trend continues to grow, more and more software claiming to help users improve their memories have emerged. Wozniak’s SuperMemo has stood the test of time, and its basis in psychology gives it an edge over more game-like systems such as Brain Age. Though his company struggles to compete with snappy interfaces and entertaining exercises, SuperMemo’s scientific foundations continue to attract users who want to continually improve their memories.