Down The Memory Lane – Triggered By A Tweet

Four of us sat in a room in Bangalore. It was some time in 2001.  I came down from San Jose, CA. My friend came from Seattle, WA. The other two were from Bangalore.  We were discussing some ideas for our first product.

  1. An Integration Server – something that pulls information from several sources on the web to create your own server and our plan was to build it in XML.  I was doing a lot of research in XML at that time and was really excited by the potential of that technology. Our concept was a slice of Web as your own database.
  2. A product called Intelliweb where you can create a web site with a bunch of semantic components. Our goal was to start with some thing simple – a few components for Dreamweaver which was the most popular web development tool at that time.
  3. InfoMinder – a tool to track information on the web and send you alerts on changes.

I started the company, inspired by a paper from Tim Berner’s Lee on Semantic Web  and created the  first version of our website.

In our Bangalore meeting, we asked ourselves a simple question.

Which of these technologies is closest to being delivered?

The answer was InfoMinder. We thought it was a a couple of months to being a product. We also decided to  work on intelliweb components in parallel.

This story has a lot of twists and turns. We started on Dreamweaver components. Built a prototype and even gave a demo to Dreamweaver user group in San Francisco. It was well received. We followed it up with some informal market research and concluded that it was not a viable business.

I created a presentation on the Integration Server (we called it XML Server) and tried to raise money. No one understood what the product was (at least the people I met) and why it was needed. So we dropped that.

So why am I writing all this now, almost a decade later? Tara mentioned in a tweet that Internet Archive has over 10 peta bytes of data. So I went back and looked at different snapshots of our site over the years. There were over 82 captures. Here is the link. Here is the ways we morphed.

– A semantic web company

– An XML solutions company

– An Information Tools company

Somewhere around 2004, we stopped updating the website since most of our traffic was coming directly to InfoMinder site. Now that we are planning to launch a couple of products, our website may become active again.  iMorph will produce various Information Engines – tools to discover, aggregate, filter and mine web content for your business.