A wide and growing gap exists between the information available to us and the information we make use of.
Countless decisions are made every day that could be enhanced through better insight and understanding.
Infomotor’s goal is to enable better decisions of all kinds: economic, personal, social, public, political, and private.
At first, real-world analogies help us quickly orient ourselves to the digital world. Over time, they blinder us to the possibilities and limit our expectations – we never expect a document to move, a folder to go searching for information, or a desktop to organize itself.
Some data is static and unchanging (your birth date) and some data changes constantly (your age). Conventions for displaying information in static form (pie charts, bar graphs) still predominate, even for dynamic data. Viewing dynamic data in a static chart is like trying to simulate the experience of a movie with a few stills. The Internet makes an increasing abundance of dynamic data available, but we mostly experience it as a series of still images (web “pages”) that are usually outdated by the time we see them.
Search engine results continue to be presented as static pages. A search term goes in and results come back – a tiny batch-computing process. Why shouldn’t the search engine get to know me and present a stream of results as they are found (“streaming search”) with tools embedded that let me interact with the results? I’d like to be able to sort by date and time, map the results to geography of origin, refine my search terms in response to a stream of real-time results, quickly store what’s meaningful so I can explore it later, and then share the whole process online with people of similar interests.
In the last half-century we’ve experienced a mass migration of information from static documents to electronic networks. In a very short time, our civilization sprouted an electronic nervous system. Suddenly a great deal of information has the potential to be searched, sorted, interacted with, visualized and shared — but not much of it is.
We’ve established the presence of information on networks, but we're only just beginning to understand what to do with it. Like ore hidden beneath the surface, it’s dormant and invisible. We know where it is, we sense its potential, and we are beginning to make use of it. What makes this moment exciting is our potential to tap this vast resource, bring it to the surface, extract its value, and use that value to improve the countless decisions we make every day.
