The Pelago Vision

I’ve been asked many times (often with a raised eyebrow) why we have two names, “Pelago” (our company — from the word “archipelago” — another post will talk about where the name came from) and “Whrrl” (our first product).  The answer lies with the word “first.”  We do not see our company and our product as synonymous; rather, we plan to build many products over time, all under the same far-reaching vision.

So that naturally begs the question, “what is this far-reaching vision you speak of?”

The Beginning

Let me start at the beginning, then.  Of course, the definition of “beginning” is, relative, so I’ll start with what I was doing when Pelago first entered my brain as a serious concept.  It was 2005, and I was at Amazon.com heading up consumer properties.  It was awesome — Amazon is such a truly phenomenal company, that even with all the kruft that comes with helping to lead a huge company, I thought I would be there for a lot longer than the almost nine years I ended up staying.

What initially made me look outward, and in particular toward mobile, was my own child-like curiosity about self-contained (embedded) computing devices.  I had watched as handsets — really my own handsets, as I upgraded and upgraded — became simultaneously smaller and more powerful.  Then data started flowing wirelessly, and my curiosity reached a point where I felt compelled to actually stick my head up and take a serious look outside of my cozy containment.  In doing this, I had the luxury of combining what I saw in mobile with my learnings about the Web and people’s behavior therein from deep immersion in the building of Amazon.com from the very early days.  And I saw three crucial trends, trends that I believed would soon intersect in a way that would create disruption and massive opportunity.

Perfect Information

The first was the trend toward perfect information, or simply access to exactly the right information at the right time in the right form.  This is an incredibly exciting trend, because it represents a shift of power to the individual, who will become literally enlightened in virtually every context.  This trend was and is visible everywhere on the Web.  With the advent of the Web, massive amounts of content suddenly became “finger-tippy.”  (Are you old enough to remember actually using physical Yellow Pages phone books, encyclopedias, dictionaries?)  Not only is more content becoming available, but the manner in which it is organized is evolving.

To understand the concept of perfect information, think about decisions people make:  how to respond to a person they’ve bumped into in the physical world, whether to purchase this plasma display or that one, whether to go on a date with this person, which school to attend next Fall, which movie to see or, more generally, what to do for fun tonight, which 401(k) funds to choose, which investment vehicles to put money into, and so on.  In all of these cases and infinitely many more, perfect information improves life.  We believe that the trend toward perfect information implies the decline of advertising, at least the kind of advertising that feeds on ignorance, and the simultaneous growth in the quality of people’s lives.

Pervasive Location

The second trend was a technological one:  it was clear to me that location-aware devices were going to become pervasive.  In the years before Pelago’s birth, the mobile-phone LBS arena saw a lot of churn.  Every year promised to be “the year of LBS,” but nothing really emerged.  Many lost hope for LBS in those days, but I kept my eye on the large capital infusions into LBS technology — think SiRF, Qualcomm and other companies developing location technology for mobile phones — particularly in the GPS space and specifically focused on consumer applications (e.g. getting fast, accurate fixes in low-signal environments, like urban canyons or indoors).  My belief was (and continues to be) that ultimately, location-aware devices would become ubiquitous, and this capability would be combined with high-speed wireless networking to enable connected location awareness.

People Are the Media

The third trend was broad participation in creating content on the Web, a phenomenon we refer simply as “people are the media.”  The rapid growth of blogging, social sites like Facebook and microblogging ecosystems like Twitter have demonstrated that people have an almost unquenchable thirst for this democratized media.  People are sharing everything from weighty philosophy to the most mundane details of their lives with their communities of friends and followers.  We believe this is just the beginning.  We believe that the next evolutionary step is organization.  Organization of people media will unlock its true power:  not only will a single voice influence the world, but collaboration will intensify and the byproducts will be better for it.  For sure, everyone’s lives will be meaningfully impacted.

Digitizing Life

At  the intersection of these trends is a blurring of the boundary between online and offline.  There is a hunger for the digitization of life.  There is a hunger for perfect information.  Location technology allows, for the first time in history, the digitization of our lives in the physical world and real-time access to contextually relevant information while we live our lives.  We at Pelago think this is huge — entirely new classes of applications become possible in this vast new playground for innovators.  As such, we’re passionate about ushering in this future — we see our mission as “removing all barriers to information, inspiration and human connection.”

We foresee a world in which human behavior in the physical world is digitized, like the human behavior on the Web is today.  On the Web, when a person clicks on a link, a digital record is created.  That record can be shared, analyzed, preserved.  There is no such record in the physical world today.  People move in and out of places with no trace.  There is no “footstream”™ equivalent of a clickstream on the Web.  But imagine the possibilities if footstreams™ did exist.  This would enable us to bring people closer together, whether in the form of a grandparent sharing his/her life adventures and stomping grounds with a grandchild or two people, perhaps friends who have not seen each other in years, who are separated by a city block or two connecting for a beer when they otherwise would have missed each other for the limitations of their human senses.  We could inspire new adventures based on the shared activities of others.  We could combine time, space, relationship and footstream™ data to open discovery vectors that people would never have found unaided.

We at Pelago are all very excited about the future this vision paints.  Of course, though, it all comes down to execution — getting from here to there.  None of this talk amounts to anything without surmounting the incredible challenge of transforming it into reality.  And there is not just one way to do that — there are many paths toward the vision, many of which will turn out to be dead ends and a number of distinct ones that will break through.  Our approach to picking a right path is to bring many talented brains together on the problem, from both inside or outside of Pelago.  We welcome diverse points of view and challenges to our approach, and we would love for you to join the conversation.