Recently we gave a sneek preview of Imindi to a very large company that is considering using Imindi to help its employees to collaborate and share ideas.  To anyone who has worked in a large company the need to encourage collaboration is obvious. The very obvious idea that one individual, team, department or division or business unit or group company should collaborate with another that has knowledge, ideas and experience that can help - is not put into practice as much as it should in many large companies.

Why is this?  I think it has a lot to do with an old state of mind that came from military thinking where information and knowledge was power. In a corporate setting that means the ability to control information and knowledge gave power to control your individual job or relationships or power to control the resources of your division or group company.

The problem however, is this military command and control model of thinking is just not good enough to cope with the demands of the dynamic and fast paced globalised economy of the 21st century.  What is required is an ability for teams to adapt and self organize to the requirements of this new world. In such a world information and knowledge is not power anymore  what matters is to contribute information, knowledge, experience and ideas to shared goals in other words - to collaborate.

So collaboration requires a new state of mind where people are rewarded for thinking and acting beyond the scope of the boundaries that have existed in their minds so far.

But how do you start to change a state of mind to one that fosters collaboration. Well maybe as an individual the first step is just to remember to consider the possibility the hard earned lessons that you learnt in a project today can help someone else from having to relearn those lessons tomorrow and then to just go on and share that experience.

In the next post I will build on these ideas and show how Imindi is providing an environment that makes it easier for people to change their state of mind to one that is condusive to effective collaboration.

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 January 2009 so you can decide for yourself whether we are indeed a semantic web or not.