As I'm sure you are aware, there's a big change afoot in the way that companies work and business takes place. Increasingly companies, small and large, use services supplied over the web to perform administrative and organisational tasks. They also frequently use software services as part of their website - mashing up with google maps or providers of data based services like credit checkers, address dismbiguation, etc. You can find loads of these at sites like http://www.strikeiron.com.
What they don't do, at least not very much, is use services to provide intelligent processing.
I think this is the next wave of services. The opportunity to sell the ability to make decisions, to analyze data, to fill in missing data, to ensure compliance with rules, governmental or corporate, is huge. Instead of selling information, we could be selling knowledge.
This idea isn't new. I made a proposal to the board of Reuters over 20 years ago that they should set up a marketplace on the Reuters data feed where third parties could sell competing trading methods, based on Reuters data. Unsurprisingly they didn't go for it!
I've been working ever since in Artificial and Computational Intelligence, developing tools that could be used to make this goal a reality. I want this blog to publicize both my work and that of others heading in the same direction.
When you think how much of human commerce is just about knowing how to do something, you then realize that the next stage is to capture that knowledge in a software system and sell it to anyone who wants it. This blog is about such a system and creating the marketplace to go with it.
