What doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger. Adam Lindemann learned that the hard way with iMindi, a startup trying to create a “thought engine” that was skewered by our judges at last year’s TechCrunch50. “It almost destroyed us,” says Lindemann. But he and his team have completely redesigned the product, which creates a mind map of your thoughts based on semantic indexing technology, and lets you “merge” those thought maps with related ones created by other people.
It is still rough around the edges, but is a vast improvement over the original concept. Today, iMindi is launching in private beta, and we have 1,000 invites for TechCrunch readers (sign up here).
The drubbing iMindi received at TechCrunch50 last year was brutal. After Lindemann’s presentation (see video below), Mark Cuban, who was a judge, laid into him:
Maybe I’m missing something, but that just sounded like the biggest bunch of bullshit I’ve ever heard in my life. You want millions of people to create a virtual decision tree, and create a virtual mind meld, and then get advertisers to mine the virtual mind meld. Why would you want to invest the time?
Lindemann and his co-founder Galen Kaufman were devastated. Investors wanted to pull out. “It was a complete disaster,” says Lindemann, “but it was the best thing that could have happened because they were essentially right. If we would have launched in September, we would have failed.”
The main problem with the original design was that users were expected to manually connect their thought maps to other people’s thought maps. It was very labor intensive, and it wasn’t clear why anyone would invest the time. There are still some UI issues, but the connections are now automated, and it is easier to dump in data from other places on the Web.
Let me take a step back and explain what iMindi is today and what it hopes to become. When you create an account, you are encouraged to sign up for different “think tanks,” which are topic areas of interest. These include “Innovation & Technology,” “Wealth and Finance,” Fashion and Style,”"Travel and Adventure,” Sports,” “Pregnancy and Parenting,” and “Mind, Spirit, and Religion.” You can create your own think tank topics. Once you’ve signed up for a few think tanks, you are ready to enter your “thoughts” on that topic.
You can enter your thoughts directly, just like writing a blog post. Or you can cut and paste from blogs, articles, or other sources on the Web. (Soon it will be possible to ingest your existing thought stream from other sources, such as an RSS feed from your blog or your Twitter feed). Once you you are done entering your thought, iMindi runs it through its semantic index and creates tags for all the major concepts it recognizes. The concepts are hyperlinked in your post and presented as a thought map below. Clicking on any concept reveals other entries you have made with the same semantic tags. If they are truly related, you can “merge” the two thoughts and they will be connected on the mind map.
iMindi is still hit or miss in identifying and mapping the right concepts. For instance, I entered a post I wrote called “Jump Into The Stream” and it produced the mind map at right. It correctly identified the people mentioned in the post, a date, and the fact that the “stream” is a “metaphor” for information consumption related to another metaphor, “the page.” But other than “Yahoo” and “Google,” it failed to identify any of the smaller companies at the center of redefining teh Web in terms of information streams (Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc.). So its semantic index needs to get better, but it would be easy for iMindi to allow users to add their own tags or edit existing maps.
Where this becomes interesting is that you can also find other people whose posts/thoughts have created the same semantic tags, and merge your mind map with theirs. In this way, iMindi hopes to help you find like-minded people. Once you do find them, you can follow them and their thoughts in the think tanks where your interests overlap. The more people who merge their maps with yours, the greater your “mind rank.” You also can see everyone’s thoughts in a particular think tank as a stream when you explore that think tank. In this sense, iMindi shares an approach with Twine, which is also powered by a semantic index and lets you follow other people’s interest feeds.
Twine is much better funded and at a more mature stage of development. (Twine’s parent company, Radar Networks, has raised $18 million, whereas iMindi was built with only $500,000 so far). But iMindi’s focus on creating these mind melds is promising. We are increasingly drowning in people’s thought streams already (Twitter, Facebook, FreindFeed, you name it). iMindi today is still too much work. But if it follows through and lets you actually ingest these thought streams you are already creating and following elsewhere, it could be a valuable filter.
Imagine being able to map your entire Twitter stream, or the streams of individuals you are following, or just individual Tweets, and mapping those across time. Putting a semantic layer on top of Twitter, or any stream of content is a powerful way to explore related thoughts and concepts. The mind map connects related thoughts not by links, but by analyzing the underlying language used to express those thoughts. In a world of ever-larger information streams, we need better ways to navigate those streams. Semantic mind maps could be one way.
iMindi still has a lot of work to do before we get there. It needs to remove steps from the way it lets you create “thoughts” and link to other thoughts. Personally, I’d lose the think tanks concept or put it into the background. Right now, if you don’t look in the right think tank, you might miss a related thought if somebody entered it into another category. iMindi needs to let its thought engine do even more of the work in connecting thoughts together, or at least exposing them to users. Lindemann is aware of these limitations, and is keeping an open mind about how to make iMindi work. Sign up for the beta and give him your thoughts.
Interesting concept, but it does sound a bit complicated to get into.
i like the automatic connect
I signed up for it but I don’t get it. What benefit does this provide?
Interesting concept but simply not practical.
Why ? you cannot create an uber semantic index for Twitter or any stream of content to explore related thoughts and concepts. And when you rely on other people’s thoughts and tagging you get too much chaff and not enough wheat.
Way too tedious !
Twine is marginally better but at least they use ontologies which are a systematic hierarchy of concepts and their relation to one another.
People may try but will quickly abandon IMINDI.
I know of other startups that have attempted this and have failed . Sorry to say IMINDI is another flash in the pan !
iMindi has its own semantic ontologies and auto-generates tags as well, so the tags should be consistent across posts.
I don’t get it. I signed up and I tried to use it- but it grabbed the most random unrelated words from my description.
I also couldn’t edit the mind-map it made, so I couldn’t fix that it picked the word “lot” from “a lot” which was unless for it to be picked.
The concept seems cool, but the interface is limited, not intuitive, has no instruction and doesn’t really do anything.
I also didn’t see any kind of import from delicious or something.
Am I missing something?
Right now, this is for early beta testers willing to put up with flaws in the system. The editing is something that will be turned on later (it was part of the original concept—I agree that they went too far in the other direction).
imindi???!! *vomit*
that name is worse than twibeo..
That video was brutal. Kudos for not giving up at that point. I would have… for sure.
Actually, I just joined the site to check it out. They should have quit a long time ago. “Describe what you’re thinking in 20,000 characters or less.” HAHAHAHAHA…. um.
It strikes me that given the complex nature of semantic data, the “need” to identify like minded individuals is best served by reading posts/tweets/etc.
exactly, this is part of what Imindi is addressing.
I had originally a post introducing the idea of Imindi back to the last September. http://yihongs-...-is-imindi.html
At the meantime, I am trying the new beta now and will post my new impression of this beta soon.
yihong
a new discussion of IMindi is here: http://yihongs-...wards-next.html
I’m going to suscribe
tried it, but the interface is a little ugly and complex
One could also use Freemind, which is a 3 year old open source project: http://freemind...x.php/Main_Page
There is no built-in semantic engine, but because Freemind produces maps in XML format, one could use the OpenCalais API (from Reuters).
I’ll wait for iMork.
Yay, just what we need. More of people only discussing topics with others that already agree with them.
I learned a long time ago in biology class about a concept called “hybrid vigor.” A genetic cross between two organisms with widely-different genotypes will almost always be healthier and stronger than those that are more “inbred.” Genetic diversity is a very good thing; over time it brings out the best genes because they’re the ones that work.
I’ve learned that this applies across many walks of life, but particularly wrt thought diversity. If artificial standards are used to homogenize how we’re supposed to think, or if we only ever share our ideas with people who feel the same way, not only will we as individuals and as a society NOT grow – our intellects will stagnate, wither, and die.
If you think your ideas are good, test them against people who disagree but are willing to listen. Either you’ll gain in strength and confidence when you’re proven right, or you’ll become wiser as you abandon ideas that were actually wrong. Most likely, some of both. But sitting in an echo chamber of the things you already agree with is a really quick way to rot both your intellect and your true worth – versus the false one you feel when everyone agrees with you.
Very interesting way of looking at things… I would agree. Maybe iMindi should take that approach and link people who are unlike minded.
Best comment i’ve read in ages. thanks. Hope you don’t mind if i quote from it in meetings:)
David, I totally agree with you. The thoughts you have inspired me to think about a project which partially tries to solve exactly this issue: how can we discover people and topics, which are not necessaraly aligned to our thoughts and opinions, but could contribute to a widening of our horizon and let us discover new ways of thinking. I’m working on this project at the moment, with the aim to develop a prototype for Twitter, get into psychological basics of like-mindedness and strengthen my research skills. Feel free to contact me about this topic anytime.
David, Imindi is about diversity of ideas the very architecture of the Mindex encourages expansive and diverse point of views about everything. To be a like mind in the context of Imindi does not mean that we agree or that we think the same thing, it means that you and I have been thinking about similar things and we choose to connect through that intersection but also enrich each others`s thinking by sharing the thoughts and points of view that neither one of us has or could come up with on their own.
There are very interesting developments going on in the area of argument and debate modeling.Tools like DebateGraph and MIT Collaboratorium allow users to collaboratively construct and visualise an explicit represention of issues, ideas, arguments, pros and cons, etc. See for instance http://events.k.../essence/tools/. These tools are great to seriously study any topic where people tend to have contrary opinions. I think Imindi uses a different approach and is more after serenpidity and discovery (connecting thoughts that are apparently unrelated).
Erick, thank you very much for this write up. As you said, we have come a long way since TC50 but we have a long way to go to realise the potential of what Imindi can become. At TC50, Imindi relied more on people to do its thing now we have brought in a lot more automation. The balance is somewhere in between and during the private Beta we intend to learn from users and find out where the ideal balance is. Also you can look forward to being able to import your thoughts from your current “Thought Stream” in Twitter and Blogs in the next iteration of the product. Thank you again.
That’s about as worthless as twitter. It’ll essentially allow the web to be cluttered with the Cartesian product of twitter with itself. Run away!!
Cuban had it right.
I signed up.
Got the confirmation.
Created my first entry.
AND NOW I CANNOT LOGIN.
FUBAR.
Dave, firstly thank you for signing up. The response has been larger than we had anticipated and the result has been that one of our machines had a malfunction for some new invites. We will have it fixed in the next few hours and will send you an email with detail.
To you and everyone else that was caught by this, we are really sorry. Imindi is very very young and the patience and support of the private-beta community will be crucial for us to make her strong enough to open to the wider world.
Thank you again for your support.
We provide include: North America (NAFTA), South American countries, the EU 27 countries, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Russia and other 248 countries and regions in a variety of Customs bill of lading data, import and export trade (Statistics) data.
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Why didn’t they take the advice to go after enterprise?? I can understand the rationale for going beyond Google (that description in the video was very well done). However, I can see some explicit applications for this in the Fortune 500. If, let’s say, they could better “mind meld” marketing with R&D that could be huge. Or brand managers with Sales. Some easy steps from there. Summary: big mistake to not go for enterprise. There are organizations that are already pretty heavy into neural analyses for marketing, so finding a contact to get a pilot underway would not be that hard.
BTW: Freemind was mentioned above. It is a pretty darn good mind mapping tool now. I encourage everyone to try mind mapping for a necessary brainstorm. It can really change you from a left brain to right brain process.
Anon: Thank you for your comment. Every piece of advice that was given to us at TC50 has been taken on board including building an enterprise version of the product. It is built and we are in discussions with two Fortune 500 companies. However the Imindi.com site is a consumer orientated service.
honestly, I really tried to read this, and understand it.. but I can’t. I gave up mid paragraph, I forget which one cause I got lost in thinking so hard, I think my mind think tank, or whatever exploded. Why complicate things?
props to Adam and the team for trucking along.
Thanks Ashot!
These guys need to practice some serious Steve Blank-style customer development. In my opinion they are completely delusional and nobody in the world would ever want this.
4,500 people already registered for our private Beta are not delusional.
Dear Friends of Imindi,
Yesterday, we were featured on Techcrunch and many of you were kind enough to sign up to the service. Unfortunately, we had not prepared sufficiently for the demand on our servers and then with some human error we accidently deleted all the user accounts. Darn.
We would ask that you forgive us and sign up one more time as members of Imindi. We will set you up with a clean account which we hope you will enjoy using to collect your thoughts and share them with like-minded people.
We are extremely embarrassed by this mistake and we have purchased more capacity and instituted safer backup processes to handle the increased demand to prevent a recurrence of this incident. It’s a private beta, and it will be a while before this service is ready to be launched in public but we hope that you will be kind to Imindi as she grows.
This one is classic. I received this email, just now.
“Dear Friends of Imindi,
Yesterday, we were featured on Techcrunch and many of you were kind enough to sign up to the service. Unfortunately, we had not prepared sufficiently for the demand on our servers and then with some human error we accidently deleted all the user accounts. Darn.
We would ask that you forgive us and sign up one more time as members of Imindi. We will set you up with a clean account which we hope you will enjoy using to collect your thoughts and share them with like-minded people.
We are extremely embarrassed by this mistake and we have purchased more capacity and instituted safer backup processes to handle the increased demand to prevent a recurrence of this incident. It’s a private beta, and it will be a while before this service is ready to be launched in public but we hope that you will be kind to Imindi as she grows.”
The cluelessness of the people running this company is amazing. Why would i trust my email and ideas to incompetent morons?
I have decided not to sign up
Successful companies and applications simplify processes and save time.
Youtube made net videowatching simple. Google simplified the search engine model while profiting from it. Twitter simplified social communication and blogging. Imindi does simplify anything. It doesn’t provide a solution to any problem.
The fact that this company by their own words admits to “we had not prepared sufficiently for the demand on our servers” should tell you something:
They have no clue what they are doing.
Ever heard of backups? DUH.
Why would anyone spend time and effort on a website that doesn’t even do proper data backups?
The fact that anyone was stupid enough to sink money into this, should tell you that we are in a social network bubble..
Always easy to critisize, very hard to build. We made mistakes, will continue to do so and will be transparent when we do even at the risk of humiliation.
But we stay in the arena and fight for what we believe is a worthy goal. We have been in product development for 3 years, we have run a live site for 2 days. We made a really elementary mistake and we learned from it.That is why we are in private Beta and have not gone live.
Well, i admire your honesty, but from my experience working in IT, losing an entire customer database without having backups will get a few people fired in most companies.
The fact that you had no backups and no planning for the wave of people who were signing up, speaks loudly about your company and the fact that you are basically adrift in the Web 2.0 sea.
Good luck.
People are pretty forgiving of tech snafus (exhibit A: Twitter) when it’s a site they really want to be using. considering imindi’s competition with twine and general need to convince users of its utility, this isn’t a great start. techcrunch scores made karma points, though, for giving them the 2nd posting.
actually people are forgiving of technical snafus when they do not lose any personal work and DATA.
Think about this: If google were to lose your stored google apps documents and claim they don’t have any backups.. would you use them again?
The mistake happened in the first three hours of going live which was a terrible thing to happen but thank goodness it did not happen when our customers had time to put a lot of data into the application. And because it did happen so early – you can be sure that we have learned our lesson and it won`t happen again. Well not on my watch.