Looking Into the Internet

I walked into the offices of The Smaby Group in Minneapolis. “Hi. Jim Chandler, here to see Gary.” The receptionist directed me to a conference room where I waited with some curiosity.
I had heard of Gary from Ann Winblad, who had founded and sold a tech company in Minneapolis before moving west to start her successful VC firm. Looking over Gary’s website, I found many innovative venture companies in the portfolio. As long as I was in town, it seemed a worthwhile idea to learn about his operation.
Gary joined me and we began our introductions. He was energetic and intelligent. He too was unsure if anything would come of our meeting but willing to exchange information.
“We have a relationship with a fluid dynamics company in St. Paul,” I said. “We’re reselling SimWorks to our customers in Japan. That’s working out quite well.”
“Sure, I know the company. At the moment, we’re investing in companies with Internet business potential. Here’s one.” He proceeded to show me a brochure from ThemeMedia. The problem addressed was finding anything on the net.
“Yes, I’ve been thinking about that too. Search engines aren’t all that reliable beyond the first few hits. It would be nice to categorize the information better; but few want to do the work to create all that metadata — descriptors, synopses, keywords. The Holy Grail is to distill good descriptive data automatically.” Then I pitched him an easy one: “How does this company distill the essence?”
“I can’t tell you what’s inside the black box, but suffice it to say we have a team of PhDs on it. The results are very encouraging. Let me show you.”
He pulled up a laptop and typed in the website. “This is still under the radar. We expect the company to launch within four months. But you can see the visual impact of searching in a 3D space.”
The image was rudimentary, black background with green, curving lines. It resembled a topographical map, such as I used for charting a hiking route in the Sierras. The elevation-lines wrapped around hills of data, representing accumulations of files. “Each mountain shows data that is thematically related?” I asked.
“Yes, that’s right. Over here you can see articles about Microsoft. I typed in ‘technology news,’ so it brought up that cache of articles. If you zoom in, more labels appear — like drilling down into the detail.”
“It’s rather like opening folders within folders to find information and its related subsets,” I surmised. Pondering this a moment, I added, “Nice visual interface!”
“Yes, that’s the thing! We believe a more visual navigation of the data with ThemeScape makes far more sense than what we have today.” I was getting as excited as he was. It would change the way we search for information online — and I was a firm believer in that need.
As I left the office, I thought more about the impact this new technology could have. In the early days of the net, the search interface was textual: you had to type in your request every time. The World Wide Web offered a more visual interface with the Netscape browser and things took off! While this new visualization was still in primitive form, akin to a birdseye view of a data landscape, it held great promise — just as text search had yielded to browsers.
I expected this would first emerge in document searches, but who knew where it would stop? This could be a visual dashboard for all our online activities. 3D developers and gamers were making progress in creating worlds into which one could step, walking around an artificially created space. Flatland, one of the companies I had visited in SF, was doing something along these lines. So far, no one had put together the whole computing interface beyond games and shopping malls. But why not? A room for work-related documents and applications; another room for travel, for chatting with friends, for … whatever we do with our computers. This was uncharted territory, open for a land grab to the fastest runners.