Innovation on the 1st of April ?!
Innovation & Humor on April Fools Day
April fool’s day falls on April 1st, and is commonly celebrated in many western countries as a day where practical good-humoured and funny jokes or hoaxes are both expected and tolerated. Beyond good laughs, we’re chasing pranks that turned into innovation.
Read further to find out the answer to the above question.
There are plentiful amazingly creative and funny pranks found on the web. From an innovation-perspective, for us, Google is the big winner, since their April Fools Day jokes added an extra layer of innovation and
2000 - MentalPlex
On April 1, 2000, Google revealed its MentalPlex tech, which could read a user’s mind to determine his search query–before he even touched the keyboard. Even though all results were April Fools’-related, the development in these past 20 years has brought (not only) Google to anticipate user’s queries. With AI on top, reading a user’s mind doesn’t sound too far off in 2021.
Google's Greatest April Fools' Hoax Ever Wasn't a Hoax.
2004 - The answer to our initial question, which technological innovation was introduced as a hoax on the 1st of April is
GMAIL
Google has never topped a prank it played in 2004 — one that was so effective that most people, to this day, don’t think of it as a prank. Speaking of the first launch of Gmail.
The product — webmail with a gigabyte of free storage, at a time when Hotmail offered 1/500th as much and Yahoo Mail offered 1/250th as much — did not sound plausible. That led many reasonably savvy folks to assume it was a hoax, especially since the announcement had an odd, jokey feel to it, and the service was allegedly rolling out to a “a handful” of people. There was simply no prior evidence that a Web service involving online storage could be astonishingly roomy rather than stingy and insufficient. Even the notion of Google rolling out something that wasn’t a search engine sounded suspect at the time.
But improbable though Gmail seemed — and despite the April 1 time stamp on the news — it was real. The hoax was that it wasn’t a hoax. Instead, it was one of the most important Web services that anybody ever unveiled. Innovation, ladies and gents.
2013 - GOOGLE BLUE
“How do we completely redesign and recreate something while keeping it exactly the same”
The introduction of Google Blue on the 1st of April 2013 is an example of a great sense of humour, taking it on yourself. The opposite of a big achievement or innovation, in fact. “It’s Gmail, only bluer!” project manager Richard Pargo exclaims in the program’s intro video (see below) - it’s so good!
2013 - GOOGLE NOSE
In 2013 it has been even two Fool’s pranks from Google. They also introduced Google Nose, the ‘Sharpest Olfactory Experience Available’.
A video introducing Google Nose explains that the feature allows users to “search for smells.” Seems complicated, right? The product intersects “photons with infrasound waves” and “temporarily aligns molecules to emulate a particular scent.” The “mobile aroma indexing program” at the heart of the product has amassed a “15 million scentibyte database of smells from around the world.”
Despite this being fake, we know that Google doesn’t invest any wasted energy into areas that don’t have potential. Let’s see how the world looks like in a few years…
What’s the innovation side of April Fool’s Day?
When you think of innovation as the absence of common assumptions and rules, then it’s this day that exactly offers this playground. Call it the combination of moonshot thinking, creativity and humour which doesn’t only light up our day, but also fuels crazy ideas that later on lead to crazily innovative achievements.
Can’t wait for what’s gonna happen today and also curious for your opinion on the innovation effect of April 1.
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