Infodipity

We built LinkedIn at a TEDx event in 2010. Nobody called it that.

FREQUENCY — Post 1 | SOUND by Nicolás Borja

There's a word that has been growing with me for the past fifteen years: infodipity.

I couldn't claim I invented it. More like I encountered it — at least for the first time — on a train, in a copy of WIRED magazine, on the way to a factory that would turn out to be a proper disappointment. And the moment I did, I had found the language for something I'd been actively doing in the most intuitive and natural manner for years but could never explain.

Infodipity, as I have come to define it, is the serendipitous discovery of the right information at the right moment, through a system that makes that discovery possible. Not luck. Not via an algorithm. A casually, and clumsily I dare say, designed condition for the birthing of ideas. This is the story of the first time I built one.

I. The window

December 2008. I'm in London visiting my sister, who's finishing her graduate project in fashion design at Istituto Marangoni. I'm working on mine — architecture, Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá. There are five of us crammed into her studio apartment in Hackney: mum, dad, older brother, and the two young ones who have yet to graduate. While I help her finish some illustrations and try to figure out what I'm actually going to work on for the coming year, in the particular chaos of two people trying to make progress on their graduate school final projects while juggling family duties, unforgiving London cold, and highly limited space — all while enjoying the Christmas holiday.

On one of our day trips to the Southbank Centre, after seeing the Louise Bourgeois retrospective at Tate Modern, at my ripe age of 24. In London for the first time, sharing the experience with my sister who's been living here a while and is so excited to show us around, I end up doing what I always do in a city I'm experiencing for the first time: walking, observing, taking it all in — until something stops me.

Something stops me.

In the window display of a museum shop, there's a translucent interface. I practically bang my face against the glass, and I see a cling film applied to it — a film that makes the LCD screen inside interactive from the outside. You could touch the window. The screen responded. The barrier between inside and outside, between display and participant, between the building and the street — dissolved.

I'm an architect. I've spent five years thinking about, drawing, planning, knocking down and building up walls. Imagining what they separate. What they allow. What happens when you remove them or make them slightly or completely permeable. And here, in a shop window on the South Bank, someone had done it for real. I thought: the future is now.

Somehow, the cold had dissipated any other soul who found this contraption remotely interesting. How has this not broken the internet? Sidenote: I couldn't think that actually, since the phrase wouldn't become a thing yet, not until 2014. I wrote down the company name. I went home and looked them up. Visual Planet, Cambridge. I decided I would go see them as soon as I could.

II. The train

Six months later, summer 2009. I'm back in London for my sister's graduation show — front row seats at an actual couture show in London. Yet somehow all I can really think about is my train ride in a couple of days to the Visual Planet factory in Cambridge. Even when one of the models miscounts her steps and catwalks straight past the end of the runway — the girl is fine, the show ends with no major injuries, and my sister lands an internship at Viktor & Rolf. Yay sis!

The day comes. Both parents along for the ride. It's been a dream of my mother's to visit Cambridge, and her excitement is clearly headways above mine, which I find both amusing and, in retrospect, correct. She wants to see all the buildings and the famed Mathematical Bridge.

The Mathematical Bridge, for those unfamiliar, is a wooden footbridge over the River Cam, built in 1749. There's a popular story, almost certainly legendary by now, that it was originally constructed without bolts — held together purely by geometry and tension — and that when a group of students and their professor dismantled it to understand how it worked, they couldn't reassemble it the same way and had to use bolts to hold it together. And so there the bridge stands today, bolted, as evidence of either human stubbornness or the irreversibility of certain kinds of knowledge.

I think back and realize now: that's me. That necesidad — o necedad? I guess almost the same thing. The stubbornness of not fitting into the designated path. The refusal of the obvious joint. The thing that stands anyway, a little awkward, a little over-engineered, held together by something that can't quite be explained. On the train to Cambridge, I'm reading a copy of WIRED and I come across an article about serendipity. Not the word exactly, but the practice: all I can remember is a guy who had made an improbable number of meaningful connections simply by being open to conversation — in line at McDonald's, at a club, through friends of friends. No system, no agenda. Just radical availability.

I'm 25. I'm founding my own interactive architecture and digital design studio. I'm importing touchscreen cling film from Cambridge to Bogotá with my co-founder. Believing, with the specific confidence of someone who hasn't failed at enough things yet, that the right people finding the right people is a problem that can be designed for.

The factory, when we get there, is underwhelming. Underwhelmingly English, as my mother would say. Two pre-fabricated trailers and an unpaved driveway. Nel, who I've been emailing with for the past six months, greets us outside and shows us into the showroom. It smells like the teacher's lounge across every British school I've ever been in. Damp carpets, English breakfast tea with a splash of milk, and cigarettes from Nel's clothes.

It doesn't matter. I already knew what I needed to know. I just needed my dad to see they worked and it wasn't an internet scam. I ordered five cling films.

III. The machine

October 2009. Back in Bogotá. Juan David Casas and I — and Jorge Cabra, briefly — start Innuo Information Networks.

Juan David and I had met through Sebastián and the guys at Interactiu Media. "Chacho" as we called Juan David, was finishing his second degree as an Industrial Designer at Los Andes, after having completed Electrical Engineering. We'd been working on projects together after our classes at university — despite the agency being a digital advertising and game design studio, we worked on what was to become the architecture branch, focusing on design contests and proposals involving inflatable architecture and digital design integration. We trusted each other's thinking. We disagreed productively and partied after the work was done. He was the free thinker, the futurist, and the one who would never back down when the hard problems had to be solved.

Jorge leaves in January 2010 — he moves to Canada to marry his girlfriend, who's starting a doctorate there. And then it's two of us.

Our parents are the VCs. We pitch them the idea: Digital Out-of-Home interactive displays. The cling films become a prototype, then a product, then something bigger. By August 2010 we have a functioning stainless steel digital information totem — anti-theft, anti-vandalism, built to spec for public spaces in shopping malls, developed with Socoda, Colombia's leading manufacturer of public stainless steel mobiliary.

We called it Tango — from the Latin tangō, "I touch."

Seeing our creation go from digital model to working prototype in such a short time, I would have never imagined it. It looked like a massive mobile phone — like a Nokia from The Matrix if it was shot ten years into the future. A beautiful, shiny, cold metal shard, standing imponente in front of us. The Tango had a 50-inch screen designed to serve as a vertical DOOH poster. On the front, a 42-inch inclined touchscreen for interaction. It was designed for the specific problem we kept coming back to: people in the same space, with things to say to each other, who never found each other. We didn't know yet that we were about to test this in the best possible conditions.

IV. The event

July 2010. We get word that TEDx is coming to Bogotá.

Young Marketing — an agency working closely with Twitter at the time — is handling the brand. The challenge they bring to us: invite 100 to 150 people, for free, and filter them to be the most genuinely aligned with the TED ethos. Not the most prominent. Not the most credentialed. The most aligned.

What do you do with that?

We get together with the other collaborating studios: IAM, Led Fish, Negro Robot and I pitch the idea I've been developing for over a year. We think about the serendipity state of mind. We think about what networking at events promises and rarely delivers. And we design a system.

A 27-question survey, mapping every area of intellectual and cultural interest that TED is built on. Self-reported knowledge and interest weights across all of them. Feed the responses into an algorithm — Juan Ricardo Martín's domain, our intern turned CTO, the mathematical architecture of the experience — and generate a matching network: highest alignment to lowest, in a six-degree ranking. Every attendee mapped to every other attendee by how much they complemented or mirrored each other's knowledge profile. The threshold was part of the design. A 27-question survey is not something you fill out casually. If you do it, you want to be there. The barrier wasn't bureaucratic — it was intentional. You were self-selecting for seriousness.

The data visualization of the results was finalized by Juan David and Ximena — a map of Bogotá's TEDx attendees by intellectual interest distribution, laid over an illustration of the human brain. The whole process, from survey to algorithm to visualization, was its own deliverable. Not just a tool for the event. Evidence of what a room could look like when it was built with intention. We called it Infodipity.

The night before the event: I'm driving home at 2am. It's raining — typical Bogotá, the kind that comes and goes and doesn't ask permission. I'm heading back to the apartment to get a few hours of sleep before returning downtown at 7am for production call time. We still have to vinyl-wrap the Tango. The event is at the Julio Mario Santo Domingo auditorium, twice the distance from my house to the office and back. The coffee break — where the Tango will live — is outside.

The hours pass. The rain comes and goes. The production team has set up tents and sandbags and a projector so attendees can watch the talks from outside if needed. Registration goes smoothly. The Tango gets wrapped. We run tests. The 50-inch carousel displaying your connections is firing correctly. The 42-inch touchscreen is responding. The UI/UX that Juan Manuel finished polishing the night before is looking better than ever.

"Chacho" is presenting Infodipity. The last short-format talk before the coffee break. It's 4pm. It's cold in the way Bogotá is cold, which is the kind of cold that surprises you every time because the city looks tropical and then doesn't feel it. What will people do when the doors open? They've just sat through hours of remarkable talks. There's coffee and food. There's the networking obligation that everyone performs and nobody loves. Will they even look at the Tango?

The doors open.

People rush to the screens.

First interaction.

First result.

Someone shouts a name. Then a last name.

"CAMILOOOOOO!!!!"

"CAMILO GÓMEZ — quién es?

Dónde está?"

A hand raises.

"Acá!"

Then someone else. People start looking for their matches — not awkwardly, not performatively, but actually, urgently, the way you look for something you didn't know you were missing until the system told you it existed. It worked. The thing we had imagined — people not dreading the coffee break, not performing connection, but actually making it — worked.

People went out of their way to use our design, our technology, that oversized cold metal shard that had come out of our heads and through our notebooks and taken shape in a 3D modelling program in an office just a few months before.

I remember thinking: so what the hell is even LinkedIn?

V. The gap

Here is what I didn't know at 2am, driving home in the rain with that question in my head.

Within two years, I would sell my stake in Innuo to Juan David.

My parents' divorce changed the financial architecture of everything. The VC funding — our parents, who had believed in us enough to bet on a stainless steel totem and a matching algorithm — restructured.

I needed to pay bills. I sold my part of the company and got a job. I sold building materials for a while. Then pools and water parks for a water treatment company. In both I felt the same pull: everyone is online, the market is there, I can see it, I just can't find the key.

A disconnection between what was happening in the physical world and the world that was rapidly changing online. A massive gap between how to find the right people and how to sell them the right things. Saving time, optimizing ideas, turbocharging collaboration — and for my specific needs: making sales.

Then, October 2012: a roommate with a digital marketing agency. Richard Leigh, Colombian, partners in Denver, a seat in AppNexus, the only authorized seller of Yahoo inventory in Colombia. They needed someone with perfect English, a work ethic they'd already seen up close, and the hunger to learn something nobody else in Colombia knew yet.

That was my cue. Performance marketing. The frequency I've been refining for 14 years.

VI. The frequency

Here's what I've learned in 14 years of building promotion systems for artists, brands, and companies across two continents:

Most platforms optimize for volume. More impressions. More followers. More connections. The underlying assumption is that scale eventually produces the right collision.

It doesn't. It produces noise.

What LinkedIn became is what happens when a matching system forgets that matching requires signal, not just proximity. It became a résumé with reactions. A broadcast channel where the loudest voices win and the most aligned thinking gets buried. A place where more makes you sore. The noise and complexity make LinkedIn profitable — but they don't make it useful for meaningful work.

Infodipity — the real kind, the designed kind — requires three conditions that can be manufactured, not just hoped for:

Density — enough people in proximity who share a frame, not just an industry.

Signal — something one of them has said or done that broadcasts their real thinking, not their title.

Friction reduction — a context that makes it normal to speak directly, skip the pleasantries, get to the guts of the thing.

We built that in Bogotá in 2010 with a 27-question survey, a steel totem, a computer science intern, and a community of people — friends, parents, business partners, and serendipitous connections — who believed something was worth testing. People shouted each other's names across a cold coffee break and actually meant it.

That's what I'm still building. Fifteen years later, with better tools and a cleaner thesis. The Mathematical Bridge is still standing, bolts and all. It turns out you can account for wood settling and warping — you just have to build for it.

Net results. No noise.

SOUND by Nicolás Borja — nicoborja.substack.com