Time to pick up the Information Flow story again.  The next leg for me is iCurrent.  Over the last 2+ years, I’ve been working with a fabulous team with the full support of the VC I wished for to build a product for personalized news delivery for the mainstream audience.  Two years quietly building a product.  Are you crazy?  I can hear some asking. In this day and age, when you can ship on the Internet in 6 weeks with no money from VCs, and when the audience can help you discover what they want?

Our case is rather simple:

1) the vision of what is wanted is old
2) achieving it is tremendously hard
3) we had earned a viewpoint on what was required
4) we were ready to play a round at a time to eliminate risks

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Some five years [&] ago, I gave a talk at BayCHI titled the Long and Winding Road to Information Flow [*].  The protagonist was the PERSON.  We called him Corbu Man, the image, here seen, that the masterful designer Jean Orlebeke created.  Thank you, Jean, still after all these years, thank you!

This PERSON is not a cog in institutional and social machinery.  He aspires and acts in a world of constraint in marvelously resourceful ways, an individual figure shaped by modern life. Having met his basics needs (not forgetting [1]), he carves out rich interests and over time engages in ways that creates rich layers of meaning in life.

Over the last 18 months, I, along with a team I’ve pulled together, have been pursuing a way for people to get regular information they want across a wide range of interests, broad and deep, professional and personal.  Many people do exactly this on the Internet now, but the experience is a mish-mash experience.

What is needed is Simplification along with Robust Fit in Real Life and Greater Yield.  What that requires is Personalization.  Nothing here has gained widespread adoption or even attention.  Nothing has been truly PERSON-alized. (more…)