EFTA00589229.pdf

§ Every day you read and create digital documents: email, photos, web pages, blog entries, videos, calendar entries, text. If you string those documents chronologically like beads on a necklace, you get a documentary history of your life. § Our Streambuilder makes it easy for you to knock any digital document into the Streambuilder's hopper (as you'd flick Japanese beetles off your roses into a funnel); those documents move out of the hopper in time-ordered sequence and become your lifestream. § If you're looking at an email and want to put it in your lifestream, just dick an onscreen button. Likewise for photos, videos, web pages. Our goal is perfect simplicity in adding-to and viewing your Stream: learn it in 30 seconds. § Sometimes you want to type or dictate a comment just for the stream ("those photos came from Schwartz"; "Just met Piffel & he seems like a moron, but he mentioned that he knew Max & that's worth remembering—ask Eva"). To do that, click or touch an onscreen button; you get a window for text (or a microphone set to record); type or speak your comment; click "done," and the comment goes into your stream. § Why have a lifestream? Because your computer-based information and communication is scattered over lots of devices (phones, pods, pads, laptops) and applications (mail, video and photos viewers, Wordpress for blo tting). Sometimes you need to go back to remind yourself; look carefully, think something over, find details you've forgotten. § To do that, rewind your lifestream as you would a video, or tell the system "go back to yesterday morning," "last Saturday," "last August"; then browse your lifestream bead-by-bead, or fast forward, or whatever you like. Your lifestream is in the Cloud and can be tuned in anywhere, using any device. Using a Stream EFTA00589229 § Onscreen, your stream looks like Coverflow (in other words, like the display Freeman and Gelernter invented and patented in 1996); or like frames in a filmstrip, or tiles in a 3D domino- parade seen from in front. § You can browse the elements of a stream as you flip pages of a magazine. Stop and look closer if you see something interesting. § You can search or focus your lifestream: searching on Max yields a stream of elements that mention Max. § Three concurrent searches yield three separate streams, each visible onscreen. One document can appear in many separate streams. § A stream has a future as well as a "now" and a past. If you want to be reminded of some email at 8 tomorrow morning, put the email in the future (at 8 tomorrow AM). § A stream has "infinite reachback"; normally no elements are deleted; you can follow a theme backwards from bead to bead into the past. Public Streams § A stream can have private and public elements, both part of the same timeline; red and blue beads on the same necklace. When you add something new, you can check the "public" box; otherwise the new element is private. § You can see the public documents on anybody's stream. (Anyone's stream but yours is a necklace of blue beads only.) § Watch someone else's stream and you see it grow in realtime as new elements are added--like a multi-media blog, a documentary history or a twitter stream with tweets plus anything else. § You can search the stream universe (all public streams you can reach) just as you search your own stream. Search the universe on "Schwartz and IBM" and you get a new stream of all 2 EFTA00589230 elements of all streams that mention Schwartz and IBM--a "Schwartz and IBM" stream fed by the universe of streams. § Searching the stream universe is like Web search, but returns an active stream of relevant documents instead of a static list of pointers to relevant Web sites. What to do with them § Look back at your stream when you need to revisit a quick decision, remember something in context, revisit some aspect of the past. § Tune in the public portion of your friends' streams to keep track of what they're doing and planning. You can have lots of streams onscreen and active at the same time. § Ten friends who want to keep up with each other can merge their streams (like shuffling ten decks into one, preserving order); each can watch and add to the merged stream. § This new stream is separate from each private stream and can be deleted at will. § Ten people around a table for a business meeting can merge their streams; each can watch and add (presentations, contact info, notes) to the merged stream. Afterwards it becomes a record of the meeting—or remains active as a chat-channel for meeting attendees. § Tune in your family stream (family members' streams, merged) for intra-family scheduling, reminding, photo-sharing etc. "I need someone to pick me up at 4." "We're all going to the game tonight." "Pick up some stuff on your way home." § Family members outside the core (grandparents...) can watch their children's family-streams merged. § Many young people want to document and publish everything they do, and everything interesting they find on the web. They can publish anything on their streams. § Departmental workgroups can use merged streams as talk, workflow and scheduling channels 3 EFTA00589231 that turn into documentation channels. § Managers can blend workgroup streams into departmental streams. § Executives can blend those into company streams. Searches (or filters) let users at each level focus on the information they need. Our Business § The core Stream Builder platform will be a free, web-based service for personal use. § It will be available to commercial users for an annual license fee. § We'll make the core platform available for download as an open-source project, to encourage independent developers to refine and add power to the system, and to help establish our Stream Builder as de facto standard for creating and using streams. § We'll maintain a community site where enhancements can be published, rated, and downloaded by users. § We'll sell stream services (technical support, training, upgraded features and plug-ins, stream analytics) to companies that use streams internally or to communicate with the world. 4 EFTA00589232