Banking on ‘accelerated memory protocol’

Charles Smith believes his company will revolutionize the way people learn and companies teach. Steve Chapple

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“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.


