The Forgetting Curve

These past couple of weeks have been a tornedo of new faces and places from which I’m still smoothing my hair.

A couple of days after I arrived I met up with Andrew who co-founded Cerego. Cerego have built a learning engine and created a social learning site called iknow.

The learning engine is based around Ebbinghaus' concept of the forgetting curve. Ebbinghaus was a psychologist who did a lot of research into memory retention and how this affects learning. His forgetting curve says that we're more likely to forget what we've just learnt in the first 20 minutes, then the first hour before it evens off after about a day.

Whilst this rate can be affected by things such as stress, the importance of the learning material and its representation, there's usually a consistent 'forgetting' rate between individuals.

If you extrapolate this a little more, it means there's an optimum time to review material you've just learnt in order to retain it more efficiently.

This is where the learning engine comes in. By reviewing (using visual and audio cues) and serving up questions on items just before you're about to forget them, the engine helps you retain what you've just learnt, thereby making you learn more efficiently and effectively.

That's the theory anyway and I have to say, after having used it for a couple of weeks now, the engine does seem to review and serve up quiz questions on items I'm just on the verge of forgetting. V. clever.

This is just one aspect of the site, which also offers a whole heap of social functionality to help you learn as well.

Anyways..

So I met with Andrew who told me about the New Context Conference and Tokyo 2.0 gathering - two industry events occurring during my first week.

As it turned out, the conference was a perfect introduction to the Japanese web industry and consumer market. The speakers were quite well known and included a number of entrepreneurs, VC and industry experts (mainly from Silicon Valley and Tokyo).

Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) gave a keynote about Open Business Networks and there was a panel on mashups with Lisa Sounio (CEO of Dopplr), Seeismic founder Loic Le Meur and the creator of Chumby Andrew Hung (also the infamous Xbox hacker).

One of my favourite sessions though was with Matt Flannery from Kiva. Kiva allows ordinary people to act as 'lending' agents for entrepreneurs in developing countries. The loans can be as little as 25USD and get paid back over a certain period. It's a really simple and clever use of using the internet to connect people.

It was a very inspiring conference and as usual the drinks afterwards was where it was most fun. (I think also because the bar was on about the 49th floor of Ebisu Garden and had the most spectacular views of Tokyo!)

The following Monday was Tokyo 2.0 - a monthly gathering of industry locals. A lot of people from the conference attended so it was fun to meet up with people I’d just met again.

So between attending the conference and a local industry gathering within the first week of being here, I’m feeling very fired up about all things webby and gaming again which is so refreshing.

It’s strange because it feels like there’s such a sense of opportunity and possibility in the industry despite the economic downturn.

Let’s see if it eventuates into anything ☺