“Ah,” says Charles Smith, smiling as we pause in the dirt at the top of Fat Man’s Misery, “if we see a rattlesnake right now it will cause you to remember what I was saying. You will focus because emotion is the thing that galvanizes learning. It creates the phenomenon called salience.”
A nature walk at Torrey Pines State Reserve with Smith is like an out-of-breath course in cognitive science, entrepreneurship and the history of San Diego dating to “Death Valley Days.”
Smith, 58, believes his latest company, Knowledge Factor, will revolutionize the way people learn and companies teach. Knowledge Factor sells a patented “accelerated memory protocol” that claims to teach people what they need to know in half the usual time and retain 80 percent of the information for a year, which is about three times better than previous methods.
What the company calls its “Amplifire learning platform” is very different from anything in the market because it measures a learner’s “feelings” about information. “Which is not trivial,” the Encinitas resident says with a laugh. “People can die based on what others mistakenly ‘know’ to be true. While different people, who really do know something, aren’t so sure they’re sure. They are correct but not confident. Obviously, it is enormously valuable to know who really does know something!
“Our system triggers a variety of mental processes that make learning stick around,” adds Smith. “We amplify long-term memory, which is really the same thing as learning. There is an optimal time for relearning material and, interestingly, it’s right about the time you are about to forget it.”
Neuroscientist Robert Burton, a company science adviser, wrote the book “On Being Certain” that details these hidden processes and some of their perils.
Boulder, Colo.-based Knowledge Factor’s learning package is sold through partners, usually publishers or business consultants. Prices vary. If a partner deploys, say, half a million Army personnel, they can probably get the price down to a few dollars per soldier per course. If a Fortune 100 company adopts Amplifire for 1,000 line workers, the price could be $100 per employee.
Smith’s last big company was Digital Stock, which changed the way photographs were sold in the 1990s. Instead of paying a royalty to a photo agency or negotiating an expensive shoot, customers and ad agencies could buy a computer disk with 100 pictures for nonexclusive use at the then-bargain-basement price of $199.
The pictures were often taken by Smith, then a commercial photographer, or his staff. Shots of his own children were soon cropping up as startup sheets on Apple’s laser printers or in picture frames at Target. After 9/11, the post office even printed “about a billion” American flag stamps shot by Digital. The Internet accelerated the royalty-free model, and Smith sold the company for many millions to Corbis Images, owned by another shutterbug, Bill Gates.
“For me, the rationale for starting a business is simple. It has to solve some problem that I’ve struggled with myself. When we got Knowledge Factor going, it was because I’d had a nasty problem with misinformation at my online image company, Digital Stock. I’ve learned that making money is not the point. If you can solve a problem better than anyone else, the money is likely to come.”
Smith started both Digital Stock and Knowledge Factor with personal savings, finding it just “too mortifying to ask someone for money for something that is inherently very risky.” As the idea proves itself out, he’s taken on other investors. “For ideas that turned out not workable for any one of a thousand reasons, I have cut the cord quickly.” Smith says that starting a company is not for everyone. “You must truly like risk,” he says. Above the aptly named but unofficial Fat Man’s Misery, we cut back to the more-level Guy Fleming Trail. At the top of a sedimentary bluff, we can see east toward Rancho Santa Fe where Smith grew up, the son of an outdoorsy Stanford engineer who thought nothing of stocking the fridge with cases of beer for his teenage children’s full-moon parties.
He remembers his father pulling out a Colt .45 and shooting a wild boar between the eyes as it charged their camp on Catalina, and a relative who built the Port of Los Angeles, and another who was president of Los Angeles’ Red Line, and yet another who made a fortune shipping the nation’s first fresh grapes from Borrego Springs to New York City in a fleet of refrigerated semi-trucks, and later negotiated the farmworker settlement with César Chávez from the grower side. He even recalls a very distant grandfather who formed the company that mined the borax made famous as 20 Mule Team Borax, the hand cleaner once shilled by that old TV ranger, Ronald Reagan.
“Wow!” Charles interrupts himself and points to the sky, “isn’t that a squirrel in the mouth of that red-tail?”
He lifts a pair of high-end birding binoculars.
“Ah, what was I saying?”
“We were talking about memory …”
“Yes, we learn from forgetting and then by trying to remember again.”
“Digression is good?”
“Getting off track is very good, so long as you return.”
Smith, who also co-founded the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, turns back to the ocean and scans the cliffs for peregrine falcons. He knows the resident birds by name. His favorite is Xena, and he once took 3,000 digital images before he got a perfect shot of Xena’s mate passing her a songbird in an upside-down aerial handoff.
“Bizarre and recent discovery!” Smith digresses. “The falcon is not much related to hawks and eagles, what we consider the typical raptors. Falcons are closely related to parrots.”
“I did not know that.”
“Try to remember.”
A nature walk at Torrey Pines State Reserve with Smith is like an out-of-breath course in cognitive science, entrepreneurship and the history of San Diego dating to “Death Valley Days.”
Smith, 58, believes his latest company, Knowledge Factor, will revolutionize the way people learn and companies teach. Knowledge Factor sells a patented “accelerated memory protocol” that claims to teach people what they need to know in half the usual time and retain 80 percent of the information for a year, which is about three times better than previous methods.
What the company calls its “Amplifire learning platform” is very different from anything in the market because it measures a learner’s “feelings” about information. “Which is not trivial,” the Encinitas resident says with a laugh. “People can die based on what others mistakenly ‘know’ to be true. While different people, who really do know something, aren’t so sure they’re sure. They are correct but not confident. Obviously, it is enormously valuable to know who really does know something!
“Our system triggers a variety of mental processes that make learning stick around,” adds Smith. “We amplify long-term memory, which is really the same thing as learning. There is an optimal time for relearning material and, interestingly, it’s right about the time you are about to forget it.”
Neuroscientist Robert Burton, a company science adviser, wrote the book “On Being Certain” that details these hidden processes and some of their perils.
Boulder, Colo.-based Knowledge Factor’s learning package is sold through partners, usually publishers or business consultants. Prices vary. If a partner deploys, say, half a million Army personnel, they can probably get the price down to a few dollars per soldier per course. If a Fortune 100 company adopts Amplifire for 1,000 line workers, the price could be $100 per employee.
Smith’s last big company was Digital Stock, which changed the way photographs were sold in the 1990s. Instead of paying a royalty to a photo agency or negotiating an expensive shoot, customers and ad agencies could buy a computer disk with 100 pictures for nonexclusive use at the then-bargain-basement price of $199.
The pictures were often taken by Smith, then a commercial photographer, or his staff. Shots of his own children were soon cropping up as startup sheets on Apple’s laser printers or in picture frames at Target. After 9/11, the post office even printed “about a billion” American flag stamps shot by Digital. The Internet accelerated the royalty-free model, and Smith sold the company for many millions to Corbis Images, owned by another shutterbug, Bill Gates.
“For me, the rationale for starting a business is simple. It has to solve some problem that I’ve struggled with myself. When we got Knowledge Factor going, it was because I’d had a nasty problem with misinformation at my online image company, Digital Stock. I’ve learned that making money is not the point. If you can solve a problem better than anyone else, the money is likely to come.”
Smith started both Digital Stock and Knowledge Factor with personal savings, finding it just “too mortifying to ask someone for money for something that is inherently very risky.” As the idea proves itself out, he’s taken on other investors. “For ideas that turned out not workable for any one of a thousand reasons, I have cut the cord quickly.” Smith says that starting a company is not for everyone. “You must truly like risk,” he says. Above the aptly named but unofficial Fat Man’s Misery, we cut back to the more-level Guy Fleming Trail. At the top of a sedimentary bluff, we can see east toward Rancho Santa Fe where Smith grew up, the son of an outdoorsy Stanford engineer who thought nothing of stocking the fridge with cases of beer for his teenage children’s full-moon parties.
He remembers his father pulling out a Colt .45 and shooting a wild boar between the eyes as it charged their camp on Catalina, and a relative who built the Port of Los Angeles, and another who was president of Los Angeles’ Red Line, and yet another who made a fortune shipping the nation’s first fresh grapes from Borrego Springs to New York City in a fleet of refrigerated semi-trucks, and later negotiated the farmworker settlement with César Chávez from the grower side. He even recalls a very distant grandfather who formed the company that mined the borax made famous as 20 Mule Team Borax, the hand cleaner once shilled by that old TV ranger, Ronald Reagan.
“Wow!” Charles interrupts himself and points to the sky, “isn’t that a squirrel in the mouth of that red-tail?”
He lifts a pair of high-end birding binoculars.
“Ah, what was I saying?”
“We were talking about memory …”
“Yes, we learn from forgetting and then by trying to remember again.”
“Digression is good?”
“Getting off track is very good, so long as you return.”
Smith, who also co-founded the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, turns back to the ocean and scans the cliffs for peregrine falcons. He knows the resident birds by name. His favorite is Xena, and he once took 3,000 digital images before he got a perfect shot of Xena’s mate passing her a songbird in an upside-down aerial handoff.
“Bizarre and recent discovery!” Smith digresses. “The falcon is not much related to hawks and eagles, what we consider the typical raptors. Falcons are closely related to parrots.”
“I did not know that.”
“Try to remember.”
