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August 9, 2007
Powerlabs internal launch
Today was an exciting milestone for Powerset. We released the first version of the Powerlabs platform for our employees to try out. The Powerlabs platform is a framework for innovation in which a community of users can generate and refine ideas as they interact with products and concepts. It combines elements of social networking, crowd-sourcing, and social search (among other buzzwords that, in our case, really make a difference).
It turns out that the product team have been using Powerlabs to improve Powerlabs itself, so there were already a large set of ideas and evaluations by the time the rest of the employees got to try the system out. And we are already finding the system to be addictive: within a couple hours of internal release (the time it took Product Manager Mark Johnson and me to play a few matches of Dance Dance Revolution), already over 50 ideas had been generated and evaluated!
With this much interest from our own small number of employees, it is amazing to think about the kind of ideas, creativity, and feedback we are going to get from the 16,000 people already signed up for Powerlabs launch in September! (You can sign up at the Powerlabs Website).
Powerlabs is so cool, in fact, that we have already started talking about potentially offering this as a service to other companies who want community innovation around their products (both internal employees and outside users). So the race is now on to see which takes off faster: a radical new way to search using natural language, or a radical new way to create products!
Posted by barney at August 9, 2007 8:49 PM
This entry was posted in the following categories: Collective Intelligence , Powerset , Social Networking
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