Well 2008 has been a good year as far as Imindi`s reception with the leading tech blogs has been concerned. We were chosen out of 1000 companies to attend Techcrunch 50 in September and in November we were chosen as one of the 10 semantic apps to watch in 2009.

Hopefully 2009 will be the year where we actually deliver on this expectation and get the only approval that matters, the approval of lots of happy customers!!

But is Imindi a semantic app? Well yes and no. Yes Imindi is definitely an expression of semantic information. The data base that we are building is a three dimension network of subjective human thoughts and the broad semantic relationships between them. However, the semantic web is a vision of creating a machine readable web, making data smarter and making the web - the one machine - more intelligent. From that perspective Imindi is not a semantic web application because our goal could not care less making machines smarter and paving the way for an artificially intelligent web. What we want to do is to use the power of computing and the internet for the purpose of making human smarter, individually and collectively.

This vision of making humans smarter by computers was actually the dream of  pioneers of computer science like Vannever Bush (As we may Think, the Memex), Douglas Engelbart (Augmenting Human Intellect), Ted Nelson ( Hyperlinks) and Alan Kay (Xerox Park, Small Talk, Graphical User Interface Pioneer) and we are steadfastly following in their footsteps.

Anyway, we will be opening up our Private Beta in April 2009 so you can decide for yourself whether we are indeed a semantic web or not.

When I was on stage at TC50 many of the judges asked a variation on the theme of “What is the point?” Imindi requires  you to sit down and collect your thoughts about your personal, work and intellectual lives. One of the judges said to me, I am prepared to invest time into filling out information for a dating site, because I know I might get a date. What is the return on investment for the time I invest in Imindi?

There are many answers to this question, but they all point to the central idea that by investing the time upfront to collect your thoughts in Imindi you create your own mind asset on the web that will work for you to find and be discovered by other like minded people and to discover new ideas knowledge information that can help you achieve your goals.

When you turn your mind into an asset on Imindi, your thoughts become your agents. You can type one thought into Google (as a search query) and you can return a set of search results, or you can collect all your thoughts about that topic in Imindi and your thoughts will not only continuosly find related information but will also discover like minded colleague that will expand your original thinking which will enable you to discover even more related information and knowledge.

Another way of describing this is to say that instead of an anonymous algorithm working for you, or even the wisdom of the crowds - by investing the time to collect your thoughts in Imindi you will actually enable your individuality - the things you care about - your I mind on the web to work for you and when your “I mind” connects with the “I mind” of others - you will have created your own unique experience of I-Mind-I.

Many people have wondered what the  web 3 0 experience would look like - we say it will look very much like Imindi.

To put my thought on “Mind Asset” in a wider context, please read Yihong Ding`s excellent series of posts on his blog “Thinking Space”

• We are in a new transition, part 1 (Thinking Space)
• We are in a new transition, part 2 (Thinking Space)
  
• Programming the Universe, Part 2 (Thinking Space)
• Next Generation Business Demands new DNA (Thinking Space)