I had a chance to spend a bit of time with Bill Buxton while in Banff last month and what was interesting for me was our conversation around innovation and of course Bill’s article in business week a while back. As I spend a lot of time explaining what we do in image searching I realize that I am constantly bringing what we do to a simple concept and that’s search. It does not matter what you are searching for (text, images, videos) or why (knowledge, marketing, monitoring), what matters is that you are searching and you are doing it online, in bigger and bigger databases.

Any technology that is going to have significant impact over the next
10 years is already at least 10 years old. That doesn’t imply that the
10-year-old technologies we might draw from are mature or that we
understand their implications; rather, just the basic concept is known,
or knowable to those who care to look.

Bill’s article should be pulled out every time you hear or read the word innovation.