Opportunities Events Awards FAQs ' Our mission is to stop computers being stupid Computers are stupid. Originally designed to process the content of structured databases, computers didn t need to know the meaning of the content they processed because the database labeled, positioned, tagged and described the meaning of each record. Today, all that has changed. Ever-increasing volumes of web pages, product catalogs, emails, word processed documents, pdf, reports, and other such data that don t sit in structured databases and that now comprise the majority of data are useless if computers are expected to do clever things with them. Computers can't personalize, route, categorize, hyperlink or deliver information to the right person at the right time automatically or without the assistance of significant labor.
Computers are fundamentally stupid.
They can t infer meaning or intention based on information the way people do, which is crucial today, when business success is based more on how you manage, process, and distribute unstructured information than on crunching raw data. In trying to deal with the problem, organizations have adapted several older technology approaches to try and get computers to operate on content. As the amount of information increases, both approaches will be unable to keep pace or scale, and because they are manual, will be too expensive to maintain over time. The Forrester Research group estimates that the amount of text-based unstructured information alone will grow to over 800 terabytes by 2004. When you add in the proliferation of other computing devices, cellular phones, and voice mail to the unstructured information mix, the model breaks down completely.