Vision

Since 1998, when we first prototyped the technology that later became NetMesh, we have been working towards our goal to dramatically improve the usefulness of information and communications technologies for the individual. Even back then, we realized that if we were able to bridge traditional technology islands and bring them together into a seamless user experience, driven by the different needs of different users, rather than what the vendors of this or that piece of technology happened to assemble at any point in time and tried to push onto everybody regardless of what they needed, technology's — and people's — effectiveness would increase dramatically. Never mind how much more pleasant it would be to interact with technology, and through it with other people!

In 1998, we were far too early for this view. People were busy selling dog food over the internet, and generally building point applications. Even if those applications worked over the internet, it was almost the opposite of what we had in mind. For a long time, we felt quite lonely as we seemed we were the only ones who thought that seamlessness, the ability to remix any kind of information in a way that made sense to the user, and applications that touched the user in more ways than just through the screen of a PC was a good and valuable idea.

Well, in recent months it has become crystal clear that we weren't wrong at all with this idea. Instead, we were just far too early. According to Tim O'Reilly, one of the originators of the term, Web 2.0 has the following characteristics: (link)

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

This is largely the idea on which we started out in 1998. Given that we've had some time to learn since, we'd like to add a few items to Tim O'Reilly's list that we've learned are also very important to deliver real user value:

Many of these capabilities are only truly valuable for the user if the technology can be aware of, and has the ability to take advantage of richly structured information, in particular domain-specific information. For example, in medicine or engineering, aggregating and remixing information requires the software doing the remixing to understand what it is mixing and what the internal relationships are. (This is the reason why NetMesh InfoGrid is model-driven and semantically aware.)

If information is not real-time, all the time, the usefulness of the information for the user is far lower. Real-time needs to be the normal case, not the exception. (The reason why NetMesh InfoGrid seamlessly integrates fine-grained events that are pushed, in real time.)

Much information that every individual uses, or likes to use, is not public. This is true for both private and business life. Therefore, all the above capabilities must be governed by a strong identity and security model that creates seamlessness for the user across information sources with different access policies, such as public, corporate and private. (This is the reason why we've developed LID, co-initiated Yadis and are strong supporters of the OpenID project.)

Further, technology must be able to reach out and touch the user when important events occur. Waiting for the user to click on the refresh button does not work in a Web 2.0 world. Multi-modal and multi-device interaction with the same information and communication universe is needed; it must be consistent across devices, and the best available mode must be used for each interaction. Why not ring the user's cell phone, for example, when something important has occurred? (Users taught us that one, and they are right. Beceause of that, we make it easy for the same application to be accessible through HTML, RSS and messaging clients.)

Finally, all of these capabilities must be available in a manner that allows the rapid delivery of applications at a low cost. (We have seen up to 10:1 cost advantages for applications built on the NetMesh InfoGrid platform.)

While we do not have all the capabilities (yet) that we'd like to have in our products, we have a superior and unique software architecture that already provides most of them. Whether we call it Web 2.0 or just a fundamentally better way for the user to interact with information and communication technologies, that's what NetMesh is in business to deliver.

If you share our view, we would love to work with you, whether you are a potential customer, partner, or employee. Give us a call.