Two weeks ago, a friend of mine had been planning a trip to the Andamans online. Her leave didn’t get sanctioned and the plan eventually bombed but yesterday she goes, “You know what, I’ve been randomly getting suggestions for homestays in Port Blair when I’m online. Isn’t that a sign? I should have definitely gone!” Little does she know what she takes for serendipity is just a bunch of cleverly designed Web algorithms.
Most of us, at some point in time or the other, have been alerted to how we are trapped in a filter bubble. Based on who you are, what you like and what you view online, search engines such as Google and Bing are constantly suggesting stuff similar to what you already know.
You look for paleo recipes and more and more suggestions will be paleo-based. You look mostly for gadget reviews, Google will prioritise a review Web site over the company’s official product Web site. These are some of the simpler examples. Over time, users are stuck within an involuntarily self-propagated information bubble, which keeps us from taking cognisance of alternate viewpoints, choices or ideas on the world wide web.
Srividya Sriram and Jasson Schrock are working together to break away from this bubble. Heipile (pronounced heypile), their brainchild, is an attempt to encourage people to explore topics better and deeper, rather than just scan and jump from one hyperlink to the next. “So, let’s take an example. Say, Mahatma Gandhi. Most people will Google it and maybe browse through the first few links presented. Those links will basically say similar things about him being a freedom fighter, the father of our nation and so on. But, there’s an inherent problem there. People will never get to know the more interesting things about him say, for example, the scandals associated with him. People who don’t know about it will never search for it. And if they don’t search for it, the search engine will never throw up results covering that dimension,” says Srividya.
In designing Heipile, the founders are trying to present as many aspects of a topic as they possibly can to the common user. “On Wikipedia, you see just text and maybe a picture or two. Heipile will not only aggregate textual content pertaining to a topic but focus on multimedia alongside. There’s a lot of content on sites such as YouTube and SoundCloud, so we want to bring all of that together on to one platform,” points out Srividya.
The origins
Jasson and Srividya should know a thing or two about the information bubble and how to work around it. Both of them met at Google in 2008, where they worked together in the User Experience team for YouTube. Jasson was sort of mentoring Srividya while they worked on a bunch of products together, including redesign of the ad system, new ad formats, information architecture and the overall YouTube ecosystem. When Jasson was asked to move to Google News as its first dedicated user experience designer, he brought Srividya over to the team.
As it would turn out, both eventually quit their much-coveted positions at Google, when Srividya relocated to India and Jasson headed out to study Business Design at the Domus Academy in Milan.
Jasson has accomplished a number of firsts in his family – having grown up on a farm outside New York, he was the first in his family to get out of his house, get a college degree and a job in the Silicon Valley. As a result, he always had a different perspective on things as compared to most others in that part of the world. The very first idea for what is now Heipile originated from his master’s thesis at Milan. And the company’s philosophy of seeing things from a different perspective comes mostly from his unique background.
Every start-up has its fair share of challenges. Heipile’s share is compounded by the fact that the founders are based in completely different parts of the world. Currently, Srividya is working out of Chennai and Jasson, out of North Carolina.
“I think it’s going to remain an international collaboration of sorts. Our video production happened in India, we have translators from 16 different countries across the world looking at our script and we’re looking at a bunch of engineers in Romania to build our Web site,” adds Srividya.
The company’s crowdsourcing project, currently live on Indiegogo, is also an attempt at getting people from all over the world to participate in building Heipile and take ownership of it. “That’s why we feel community is the most important thing in building this product. If we can encourage people to voice their opinion and basically contribute and curate content from their perspective, we can organise it and present it to various users,” says Srividya.
Funding
The Heipile project on Indiegogo was created to raise a maximum of $50,000. Within three weeks of the campaign going online, Heipile had achieved about 14 per cent of that goal. “We need the funds to get the team of engineers from Romania on board. With the rupee going down, a big chunk of our funding has actually come from the US,” admits Srividya.
Crowdfunding, in itself, has been a big learning experience for the team. “It’s a constant hustling game and it’s definitely not easy. There’s so much research that tells you what to do to run a successful crowdfunding campaign but it’s almost impossible to get all those things checked off the list.”
The main reason why the founders chose to go with the crowdfunding route first is because they wanted to see if the public would actually appreciate a concept like this and as it turns out, the campaign has validated that hypotheses. “Now that we have this little bit of validation, we’re going start talking to investors. There are some people in San Francisco and Berlin who we are going to start approaching and then, we will take it from there,” says Srividya.
While the company has no salaried employees as of now, the founders are networking with a bunch of field experts such as David Weinberger, an American technologist, Ethan Zuckerman, a cyberscholar and activist, and Chris Messina, the inventor of the hashtag and one of the pioneers of Web 2.0.
Once up and running, the company plans to monetise their model by offering premium, paid accounts. Users who opt for this will have access to more sources of information, such as official and academic journals, instead of just open source information from across the Web.
Jasson and Srividya plan to start talking to investors soon so they can get some people on board and “ideally get a beta version of Heipile out by the end of this year”. They have their fingers crossed for enough support from the community to nurture Heipile, a concept that they proudly call “the lovechild of Wikipedia and Pinterest”.