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A lot has happened since my last post on leaving Addis Ababa last March. Since then I left the Joint Research Centre taking advantage of an early retirement scheme partly in order to found a new company -OSVISION ( http://osvision.com) with 2 other partners - David Horby and Dave Cote. OSVision has licensed the core software for the Europe Media Monitor (EMM) developed by my ex-group at JRC (http://press.jrc.it) and has also developed its own software to provide customised media monitoring and open source intelligence services. We are also involved in Semantic indexing and Opinion mining as these applications evolve through the internet.

It is still quite remarkable that the Web (internet is actually older) really only exploded in 1993. I remember downloading Mosaic from NCSA’s web site and checking What’s New on their site until they could no longer cope. Then 2 years later I saw the first URL on a London Bus. Today the publishing phenomena has literally affected everyone’s life on the planet - and it took just 10 years . There is no doubt that the immediate access to information anywhere anytime has revolutionised human society - but has it also perhaps dumbed us down ? Where are the original thinkers ? Have we been subsumed in past knowledge ? I am not completely sure that educaiton benefits as is promoted all the time. An example is ordering food in a restaurant. Try and order something not on the touch screen at the till. Everything breaks down. The digital world can also negate common sense.