Haven’t you ever wondered how something like the web has been able to change our lives so much in such a short period of time? I mean, the general public has had access to affordable Internet connections for what, 15 years or so. And as soon as this connection entered our houses, so did all sorts of services and usages: email, chatting, online auctions, e-commerce, and the list goes on, and on, and on…
Actually, we often confuse two very different things: the Internet and the Web. To make it short, the Internet is a physical network, made up of cables, routers… and WiFi radio waves! The Web is a totally different beast, it’s completely immaterial, it’s a virtual world of information and intelligence that spreads and circulates on the physical network of the Internet. And it’s not the only one. The email system is another virtual thing on top of the Internet. Even if you access your mail with a webmail like GMail or Hotmail, behind the scenes, it’s another application.
Let’s focus on the Web for a moment. My theory is that the biggest technological revolutions are based on the simplest concepts. The WorldWide Web (WWW) fits in that definition. There is one main concept behind the web as we know it: hypertext. The idea is that the Web was designed as, and still is for the most part, a knowledge network. Our collective knowledge and information is stored in web resources and all those websites are connected together via links, or to be more precise, hypertext links. It seems so natural to us today that it’s hard to imagine how such a simple idea can be the source of such a revolution. But just think about it for a minute: without hypertext links and websites, knowledge was stuck in books, on paper, and the only way to reference another book is with a bibliographic reference. And when you want to use that reference, you have to understand it, parse it in your mind and physically get to where the other book is stored. With hypertext links, it’s over. All you have to do is to store content in a virtual form in web resources, and create Unique Resource Locators (URL) for each and every piece of knowledge, and BOOM! Hypertext does the rest. Hypertext enables interconnection of knowledge pieces on the Web.
The truth is, the Web was designed at a time when there was no such thing as a mobile network. The Internet on which the web resided was mainly based on landlines and fixed connections. Which implies that most of the communication standards that make the Internet tick were not ready to handle mobile communications. For example, one of the most important standards, the Internet Protocol (IP) that defines the format for Internet addresses and how messages are routed from one point of the network to the other was not suitable: there weren’t enough available addresses to cover so many devices, and there were plenty of problems related to security and connectivity. That’s precisely why this standard, the language used by Internet nodes to communicate with one another is currently being upgraded worldwide to a new version that should cover for these new issues. But what about the Web?
Now that the Internet is progressively reaching our mobile phones, of course the pipes are open for existing usages like Web, email and others to invade our pocket. But are they really adapted? Think of email for example: the way it was designed, you have to connect onto the Internet and retrieve messages from your mailbox. But that’s not the way we expect messages to work on mobile phones. With Short Message Services (SMS) we’ve become dependent on being warned when there’s a new message for us. That’s why some companies like RIM and their Blackberry device have become so famous: they offered a new service called push-mail, which is really just a workaround to handle the limitations of an old system.
For the web, the differences are even bigger. Some are limitations of our mobile devices: the typical screen is much smaller than the ones we use on the traditional web, the keyboard is less comfortable too. Others are limitations of the Web itself and the basic concepts underneath it: for example, when you use your computer to access a resource on the web, your physical location is not relevant, which is why web addresses (URL) don’t embed that information. When you use a mobile, your location IS relevant, and more and more devices are able to retrieve your location. Wouldn’t it be great if that data was integrated in your service requests, so that the information you get takes into account not only the information you’re looking for, but also where you are right now? Oh and by the way, time becomes relevant too, right?
That’s precisely what I call “Hypercontext”. It’s like the next level of hypertext, a way to interconnect information not only based on it’s location, but also on the time and location when and where it was requested.
But what’s the point in terms of usages, you might ask. Well, let’s talk of advertisement for example. For years, we’ve been told that you can access many services on the web for free because they are funded by advertising. At the end of the day, we all have to make a living, so somebody has to pay. And if advertisements get on your nerves, then it’s a trade-off: you have to take the premium version and pay for it. So it’s either visual annoyances or charging. The question is why are advertisements so annoying? Well, most of the time it’s because it’s not very relevant, and since you’re so invaded by irrelevant information, you tend not to look at them anymore, so they become even more annoying in order to catch your eye just for a second. Some actors like Google have gone a long way in improving this situation with their AdWords. When you search something on Google, the results include ads that are related to the topic your searched for, hence it yields better results for announcers and it doesn’t need to be that annoying. But on the mobile, even Google Ads are annoying again, because they don’t take into account where you are and the time when you make a research. That’s where hypercontext comes into play: forget about parasite ads that pollute your precious small screen space! Now ads are valuable information that is embedded into the results you get from a service.
More importantly, the Web is mostly based on information. It was designed for users sitting in front of a static screen, not for active mobile users moving around with a device in their pocket. Hypercontext takes care of that major difference too. Since it embeds your location and time, it gives you access to hypercontextual actions. When you look for a movie theater in TagSpot, you get information about all the theaters near you, that are currently open, and you can directly buy a ticket for a given movie. That’s Hypercontext, that’s TagSpot!
Many people talk about “the Mobile Web”, a trimmed-down version of the Web as we know it, that will offer the same possibilities as the ones we have on our computers. And since there are three times as many mobile users as traditional Internet users, then it’s seen as a huge business opportunity to spread even more annoying ads. My point is: we have to be more creative than that. The mobile web is just not enough. It’s merely a transition technology. The real revolution shall be based on a new but very simple concept, and now you know about it. Hypercontext.
We started to look for an early investment solution. In the US, there is YCombinator. They give you a few tens of thousands of dollars based solely on a short presentation to get you from the idea to the first version. But we are not based in the US, and we don’t want to move since our best market is Europe. So we looked for a European equivalent, and we found better than that: SeedCamp.
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