Tuesday 17 March 2009

A quiet March

March has been a quiet month for Majorana Informatics and Feed Distiller. As a UK company we have to write a company report and accounts every year, and this takes time, more so for a small company. We managed one trip out to meet up with bloggers in London, and came back with a few ideas for future services. Our ad revenue is up, and we made a move that reduces our cash drain, so much that we need not worry for a long time to come (thats important in these times of recession). We also sparing some time to look pure Information Retrieval research. Information Retrieval is (very roughly) the science of search engines, and finding 'stuff' via computers. Despite all the money Google has made IR is a rather sleepy science, measured at least, by the number of research papers on the ArXiv and CiteSeer. More that likely most of the Research goes on under closed doors nowdays. It takes years of trial and error to find out what works well with users, but if published and not patented it wouldn't take to long for another company to take the idea and build a application with it.

We so looking to the future, that our director Dr Adams has also just started a blog about the Future of Internet where he looks how the internet might develop into the far future, and what it might mean for humanity in general.