Three Media Lab alumni from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have gathered together some money from Informix Corp and venture capital companies and, with the blessing and assistance of MIT star Nicholas Negroponte, aim to produce a radically different way to organise and view information gathered over the Internet. The announcement from San Francisco- based Perspecta Inc contains all the buzzwords you could ever need for an Internet start-up. President and chief executive Steve Holtzman said, somewhat vaguely, that the company is developing new ways of organizing information and navigating through it: a totally new paradigm, of course. Holtzman said Perspecta’s technology would represent the third wave of navigating the net; the first two being regular search engines and the still nascent push technology. He said it would be complementary to push technology but would use 3D visualisation technologies developed at the Media Lab, of which Negroponte is the founding director. MIT’s Galaxy of News and Millennium Projects which came out of the Visible Language Workshop, will be used as the foundation for whatever comes out of Perspecta. The visualization techniques would eliminate the need for long lists of links to other sites, and would use pictures to explain the content. If that sounds vague, then that’s the idea. Holtzman wasn’t giving anything away except his level of self-confidence in the products. Informix is a significant investor in Perspecta, according to Holtzman, and he said we will be hearing more about the Informix partnership, in the near future.
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