Useful Context Is the Future of Human Information

In a recent article, Nokia: 'Say goodbye to the apps phone... Nokia's EVP of services Tero Ojanpera stated that "We are moving to a place where your mobile device will be able to offer a limitless amount of context and personalisation in real-time,"

I completely agree that useful context is the future of user information. Think about it. In ancient societies, people's lives were lived in useful context. In the villages where they lived, information about the weather, crops, hunting, family, health, leadership, conflicts, history, and societal relationships were basically ever-present. A human did not need to look far to find needed information or context. Useful context was always present or easily accessible with the human powers or sight, taste and sound.

Now roll the clock forward to our time. Our digital world has enabled us to be aware of events across the globe, way beyond our normal human capabilities of natural perception. We can choose the communities to which we belong, only connected by an Internet connection. With a click of a button, we can become overwhelmed with information that is not connected to our context.

In our development of News Patterns, we enable our users to create a useful context, that serves as a lens through which they can collect and interpret news that might be relevant to themselves. No single News Radar attempts to be definitive on each news fact. Rather, News Radars create the environment that increases the probability that useful trends will be perceived and investigated further. In a sense, News Patterns is creating a continuous environment where a user can continually perceive his/her market or political space in a useful context, just as villages of old provided context for early human civilizations.

The crazy genius who has newspaper and magazine clippings pasted all over their walls

In Mike Melanson's recent article in ReadWriteWeb, he made a reference to "the crazy genius who has newspaper and magazine clippings pasted all over their walls with circles and lines and highlighted paragraphs to find the hidden common threads and secretly wished that you were crazy and smart enough to be that guy?" Of course one of the best references to this is "A Beautiful Mind," the 2001 movie about the mathematics genius, John Forbes Nash. In the movie, there were many scenes where Nash, played by Russel Crowe, surrounds himself with news clips that he attempts to connect as patterns. When I saw the movie then, I related to Nash's attempt to create a visual representation of connecting ideas. I also related to the idea that such methods might seem crazy.

But I did not think that visualizing these was crazy. In fact, my first degree and job were in structural engineering. You know, the engineers that build bridges and sky scrappers. We could not do our jobs as engineers without CAD, which is a visualization system supported by underlying calculations. So in many ways, the foundation of News Patterns is the goal to visualize patterns in markets, society, politics, and finance based on first finding patterns in the news, then creating visualizations that convey these patterns to users. With the flood of news, blogs and social media, I cannot imagine distilling understanding from so many articles without News Patterns engines.

Free versions of News Patterns access

We have recently been asked about free versions of News Patterns access. This we can do, and eventually will. If you have suggested features for this application, please add comments to this posting. Nevertheless, the News Radars on our site are a good starting point for real time intelligence and discovery.

The cobbler's children go without shoes

This is my first blog entry, even though you would expect the   president of a news and social medial intelligence company to be well   versed, himself in social networking communication.  Now I will start.    Just last Thursday afternoon, I was interviewed by Mike    Melanson of ReadWriteWeb.  Before we knew it, his article was on   line, it resonated with many of his readers, our servers were smoking   with activity, and the social media was buzzing about our innovations   with visualizations of news.  Mike and ReadWriteWeb are indeed   influential.

Here is his article: News Patterns: Finding Hidden Threads in Everyday News. Nice job Mike!