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Picture credits: Flickr / Helga Weber

Do you sometimes feel like you forget too many things? Well, probably. Otherwise, why would you be using Memonic? ;-) A recently published study conducted by the Columbia University in New York showed amazing new insights in the way we memorize (or don’t, eventually).

They looked at how we keep information and knowledge in the 21st century with omnipresent Internet access. What the found is interesting: thanks to Google & Co our memorizing capabilities are decreasing. The essence of the study is: we keep the location of where we can find the information rather than the content of the information itself.

What they did is quite simple: Two groups of test persons had to memorize 40 pieces of information. One just got the pure snippets while the others did also get the location where the information was stored (which was cryptically and not in mind-friendly path). While the first group could remember more of the contents, the second group proved extended memory of where they could find it – and thus were able to get more information eventually.

It’s not a bad thing that we lose the capability of remembering information, since we have Memonic luckily ;-)

Addiction as such is a strong term. And it’s controversial. Commonly it’s being associated with things like alcohol, drugs or cigarettes. These addictions usually have physical and psychological impact, meaning they harm your health and mind. But there are other addictions – like coffee drinking – that don’t necessarily result in a damage of your (or others eventually) body shape or mind, usually referred to as soft addictions. They rather have an impact on your personal time and productivity. It’s well known that there is some sort of Internet addiction, which is a soft addiction. Today I would like to ask the question: To what extent are you addicted to information as such?

Source: Flickr.com / Giuseppe Bognanni

Information is not limited to the Internet; just think of newspapers, books, television, radio, word of mouth, and many more. But I think we all agree that the Internet is one of the biggest sources for any kind of information. Twitter registers more than 1.600 tweets per second – or in other words – 142 million tweets per day. Facebook sees more than 11.500 status updates and posts per second, which makes up for 1 billion pieces of information shared on Facebook per day. On Youtube, people upload 48 hours of video every single minute! Overwhelming, even more since it’s likely to continue growing. This is all information after all.

Be it in our jobs or in a private context, we rely on knowledge, which eventually is based on information. It makes us accomplish tasks, run projects, discuss with other people and educates us. But to what extent do you consume information? Is it just to be able to run your life, I’d not consider it an addiction.

Patrice says: “I have 333 subscriptions in Google Reader and at the moment only 47 unread stories. Whenever I have a lazy moment the sites I open on my iPhone are either NZZ or the Dashboard. So yes, I’d guess I’m addicted to information.” Chris agrees: “One reason why I’m reading feeds or other news sources in every spare minute: for being informed.” Can this already be considered an addiction? Marc on the other hand thinks that it’s bullshit. If you can live without it, it’s not an addiction. Fair point, as it would be true for most hard addictions as introduced at the beginning. If you leave it away and you start shaking, you’re probably addicted. For soft addictions like information addiction however, I don’t agree. I don’t expect people to shiver just because they don’t have access to news or alike.

I think I would draw the line when it starts to harm your personal time, your productivity and your mood. If you start procrastinating because of information consumption it probably is addictive behaviour. Like Patrice said, he usually opens his Google Reader when he has a lazy moment, it does not mean that it hinders him from working. I catch my self from time to time surfing around, following various links even though I already found the bit of information I looked for, since I am quite eager for knowledge and thus reading a lot, even though it’s not directly related to what I intended to do. This might already be slightly addictive behaviour, although I wouldn’t go so far and call my self an addictive (which is said to be one of the symptoms of an addiction, though ;-) ). Chris adds to his previous statement: “Second reason: for just killing time since I’ve somehow lost the skill of being idle. This is influenced by the simple and omnipresent possibility to have access to information all the time. Some years ago I did not experience any hangover when being offline during vacation. But this spring I noticed that I’ve been impatiently waiting for crossing the border to Switzerland in order to have my phone hooking up to a 3G connection again.”

Well, so it’s the circumstances that seduce us to overconsumption of information? Not at all. Just because we have the possibility to do so doesn’t mean we have to. Our chat regarding this topic went on for quite a long time, and we feel that there’s also a little bit of philosophy behind this discussion.

I would like to continue this dialog here, what do you think about information addiction? Have you caught yourself scanning your Facebook timeline during a meeting? Checking the Twitter feed while having dinner? Are you addicted? Does it harm finally?

Today a technology startup is almost by definition lean. This is a direct consequence of Moore’s law – doubling of the computing power every 24 months.

Just before the turn of the millennium, we – the Memonic founding team – helped develop a large portal application for a client. The hardware costs (mostly development and live servers) alone bordered on 1million CHF (or €900,000).

Then, in 2006, we built local.ch, today Switzerland’s largest homegrown website. The initial hardware costs for the site were approximately 100,000 CHF (€90,000).

For the past year, we’ve been running Memonic.com, a highly scalable online note-taking application with a few hundred thousand users, for – hardware costs – just 10,000 CHF (€9,000).

Within just a decade, the price for the physical – server –side of an online operation was reduced by a factor of 10² . Next to spending less, it implies fewer and fewer assets. Today we’re running a cloud-based platform.

Nowadays, there are almost no fixed assets in a typical startup balance sheet. You can build a feather-light startup.

That’s Moore’s law in reverse.

Yet it is somewhat inconceivable that the same kind of lessening will happen in the next ten years. If it did, it would imply that we’d be able to run that same platform for just 100CHF (90€) a year.

Over the next 10 years we will probably see an additional price decrease but the price for running the physical side of your online platform will most likely level out. Interestingly, there are some indications that the same is about to happen to Moore’s law.

Let’s now turn to the software infrastructure needed for running our businesses. Here, it is the same story:
For the first mentioned portal project, we purchased Oracle database software worth hundreds of thousand of Swiss francs. Today, we run similar volumes of data at a fraction of the (software) cost of that time.

How? We stand on the shoulders of giants, using their free to cheap software solutions. It’s gotten pretty robust. In fact when we recently compiled a list of applications we’re using*. Quite a zoo!

For each and every business process, we currently employ a SaaS based solution, with the exception of Skype and some development frameworks (see here for a full list).

All in all, we spend less than 1,000€ a month, and that’s for running the entire software stack required to build, maintain and support our operation.

The cost advantages are here to stay. However, in both the case of software and hardware, we do not foresee them dropping much further.

At some point, Moore’s law in reverse will level off. It is hardly imaginable to run the entire backbone infrastructure in 10 years time for 10€ a month. More savings will only be possible through scale.

Given this, we believe that the argument for scale will eventually push a number of growing startups to merge or to be bought at an earlier stage to stay competitive even on razor thin margins.

In sum: there’s never been a better time to build a startup.

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* Disclosure: The author is not affiliated to any the mentioned software vendors, nor does he posses at the time of writing any financial interest in in any of the companies.

That’s right:  By popular demand and following your requests, we have just released a great and easy way to import all your Evernote notes into Memonic – so you can turn those into a collaborative living digital collection. As with the Delicious importer, we hope this too will serve you well.

Now, you can use your Evernote notes on Memonic, and use them on your favorite note taking platform. Share them with friends, collect them with friends, and see what’s trending via the dashboard by connecting to friends and colleagues on our platform. We hope you like it.

How It Works

Evernote allows you to export all your bookmarks into a file. Please select all notes into the file before exporting, and then export. Upload that file on this page, and we’ll do the rest. Important disclaimer: if your Evernote collection is huge, contact us first.

• All your links, tags and descriptions will be imported.
• Private bookmarks and items will stay private, and public links will stay public.
• You will be notified by mail as soon as the import is done.

For more, go to: http://www.memonic.com/tools/import/evernote

We look forward to your comments!

Pic by rpongsaj / Flickr

Over the past few weeks, we have received several queries requests about privacy, and in light of how important and relevant this discussion is (perhaps you heard of the DropBox mishap last week….) , we would like to dedicate a blog post to address any concerns you may have.

Be it the web client or any other native client (desktop, mobile), on Memonic, information will be transferred using a secure connection with SSL. While SSL was previously a Premium feature, we felt that this was elementary and thus added it for the free plan as well. Now, all your communication is even more secure.

When logging in, passwords will be sent in clear text. But don’t worry – it’s all over SSL. So even they get submitted unencrypted, they get sent via a secure connection. Please note: this will change in a mid-term manner, when we switch to OAuth, a well-known authentication standard.

If you chose to save your password locally (so you don’t have to remember it every time), it will get saved “hashed”. This means that bad people won’t be able to read your password. The full truth: If some really bad people break the multiple security layers then a collection might be at risk. It’s on top of our to-do list to continuously improve security.

Another common question we get is whether notes and memos were encrypted. They aren’t. We think that Memonic is a note-taking service and not a password-safe. So your notes are secure – as long as you chose a secure password for your login. In that regard we recommend to use at least 8 characters, both capital and lower case letter, including some digits and special characters.
If you need suggestions for a good one, go to passpack.com – it’s also fantastic for keeping all your passwords in one place.

Any more questions? Please do not hesitate to ask!