I just watched Scoble’s video about Urban Seeder, a new website in beta that invents a new paradigm for technology to assist meeting people you see in the real world. Urban Seeder was born out of a year long thesis project by its founder, who researched how people flirt and find love. It’s an interesting approach, since most consumer entrepreneurial ventures are born out of the instinct of its creators, and not a deep analysis of consumer behavior. (Large corporations, on the other hand, often have reams of market research and consumer insights data to support the viability and potential of a new product or service, as a way to mitigate risk.)

It’s clear that the founder’s research indicated there was a need for a method to safely allow relationships to seed and grow anonymously, and offer a way to seed a relationship more effectively than a casual passing, which can be a missed opportunity, and less forward than giving out a phone number.

However, does the site go too far in its attempt to alter conventional flirting behavior? The site will sell personalized and wearable patterned clothes and accessories that are recognizable by other users of the service, for example, and if you have an interest in meeting the person, you can take their picture and the service will recognize the pattern and point you to the person’s online space. How strange of a behavior is that? Will you really want to take a picture of someone, because you hope to meet them, and not have the guts to introduce yourself?

Or, you can give out seed cards, which have a code that directs you to a private and personal online space, which includes where you will be on a given night. But, do you really want to respond, or go to a physical place where the giver of the seed card will be, without knowing what the person looks like? (the site seems to favor anonymously giving out seed cards, and yes, I know that’s a superficial question, but I would bet a very real issue. There’s a reason why Hot or Not is so successful.)

This leads me to ponder a fundamental innovation question: Is it possible for an innovative solution to be too unfamiliar to be widely adopted, even if it’s clearly better than its current competition? For example, I think the Segway is an incredibly good way for people to commute within cities. It’s possible to travel at a much faster pace and to travel a farther distance than walking. It doesn’t require finding a parking space, or sitting in traffic for extended periods of time, as you often must do with a car, and it produces no harmful emissions. Yet, it has not been widely adopted. To what extent is this a question of affordability vs. marketing or a challenge of altering behavior? (another example of an innovative product that significantly improves life is Tivo, which has taken ten years to be widely adopted vs. Google, which arguably was adopted extremely quickly, because it offered an incremental and not revolutionary innovation.)

Also interesting to me is Urban Seeder’s use of video to demonstrate how the service can be used. Video can be an extremely effective way to communicate how innovative concepts function.