The PC and the "GUI" of the 1980’s and 1990’s made it possible for tens of millions of people to author and manage documents. But with the spread of the Internet, the number of items information users need to deal with has increased dramatically. The established metaphors and tools for dealing with this mass of information are starting to creak and groan. Just look at the average person's “inbox”.

We're routinely dealing with thousands of items of personal information - documents, email messages, web pages, calendar items, contacts, pictures, etc. The folder, desktop and drag-and-drop metaphors are no longer up to the task.

Our Mission at Pi

At Pi we are working on simple metaphors for managing all your information - your Personal Information – all the information that you have access to, send, receive, search for, and publish. We build off the simple metaphors of:

• Searching
• Subscribing and Aggregating, or Collecting, into manual and automated views of information
• Sharing and Publishing

Variations of these techniques have been used widely for information published on web servers and accessible from your browser. At Pi we take these idea’s and extend them to encompass information that lives on your desktop or laptop, and to encompass information that lives in documents of any type, not just web pages or emails.

We also believe that users should be able to do the following things with their Personal Information…

Publish and share as easily as you consume with full control

In addition to providing you useful views of information and its context, we believe it should be very easy to share, or publish, these views with others, and to do so securely. It should take just “a mouse click” to share a view of information with others. And this should be possible without having to set up external servers and infrastructure. Of course, it takes “a mouse click” to remove the sharing as well – leaving you in full control of your personal information.

Round the clock access with full control

Finally, we believe that users should have their personal information always available to them, wherever they are and whatever device they are using.

Pi accomplishes this by replicating information across machines and devices, freeing the user from being dependent on a single device. Pi users can choose at any time whether they replicate their information at all, and where their replicas reside:

• Replicas can be set up on a user's own devices and networks providing high degrees of control and privacy.
• Replicas can be automatically set up on Pi hosting services providing 24x7 high-speed availability and strong security.

See the same information in a way that’s appropriate to the task at hand

In addition to the basic sharing capabilities Pi users will be able to choose task appropriate "skins" that combine sophisticated functionality with the user's information to ease the task at hand – examples may be seeing information organized by where the information came from (an “email view”), organized by time (a “calendar” view), or by task.

Capture the Context

One of the failings of today’s tools is that it is hard to get back the complete context of a task. Think of being in a meeting and all the items of information that are relevant: presentations, a list of attendees, private notes by you, notes you wish to share, notes by others, action items. Today it is surprisingly cumbersome to capture all this information in a way that is easy to get back to, and if needs be share with others.

At Pi we intend to solve this problem.

Coming to a PC near you soon

Pi software and services will be available for pre-release testing soon. 

We want and need your feedback,  please follow this link to our contact page and write to us.

Paul Maritz
Founder and CEO