Like many of the people who I hope will use this
software, I am an academician by trade and training.
I have a Ph.D. in philosophy, teach at a liberal arts
university, and write about cognitive science, computers
and the mind.
How did I get into the software business?
Basically, it all started because I wanted tools that I
didn't have. So I invented them. Or, better, I
re-invented them.
As scholars or students we have
traditionally related to texts in three different ways:
Word processing came along just about the time I was in
college. In retrospect, it seems incredible that I
did my senior thesis in Waterloo Script on a VMS
terminal. Discovering the Macintosh in 1984 was a
kind of epiphany that opened wonderful doors for a person
who was a quick thinker and a fast but sloppy typist, and had
a dissertation director who made me write ten
drafts.
Other people at places like Apple and Microsoft were
already doing good word processors. (Before they
started doing bad word processors that were bloated with
lots of features nobody wanted and totally changed all the
things we had gotten used to doing in the all-time
pinnacle of word processing programs, Word 5.1.)
Word processors rock when it comes to doing one part of
the scholarly enterprise: writing papers and
books.
But let's face it: when it comes to the other two parts
of the scholarly life--reading books and working with
notes--word processors are the wrong kind of tool. (Or,as
some of my students might put it, "word processors
suck" at these functions.) Word processing
programs aren't set up for doing sophisticated keyword
searches of thousands of little notecard-sized documents
holding your notes and quotes. And electronic texts,
which are slowly coming into their own, don't give you the
standardization, quality of formatting, or convenient
margins for scribbling notes that you get on a real
paper-based book.
So I decided to work on doing
electronic notecards and let other people worry about
electronic texts.
 |
-------> |
 |
In short, I decided to design software that did
something that I felt I desperately needed for
myself. OK, in part this is because I'm the kind of
person who finds it really irksome to do something in a
slow, cumbersome old-fashioned way once I see that there
is a better way to do it. But I also realized that
my needs here weren't idiosyncratic -- anyone I mentioned
this idea to in the academic community instantly saw what
I was talking about.
I made my first forays into this project in the late
1980's, while teaching computer classes to support myself
through graduate school. I tried versions of it in
HyperCard (perhaps the all-time coolest program I know of,
but alas, not a relational database), and tried building
from the ground up in an age when there were not
off-the-shelf libraries of software routines and you had
to write your own code to handle every mouse click and menu
event. Then I got a real academic job and wrote my
first book and got tenure, while keeping a watchful eye
for a software platform that would let me do what I wanted
to do without abandoning my own scholarly life entirely.
Let there be no mistaking: writing a real software
application is tough, demanding, painstaking work.
While the idea of a for-profit business was always one I
had considered, it eventually became clear that there was
no point in doing a note-taking software product unless it
was done right and marketed to the great number of people
who would want to use it. And the way to do this was
to form a company to produce the product and pursue it as
a for-profit venture.
Don't get the wrong idea: IntelliGents is not a company
owned by venture capitalists and looking only to make a
quick profit and then cash out in an IPO. We are a
privately-owned company, making software for
scholars, by scholars. We make things that we
ourselves want for our own use, and we
make them available to others at a very reasonable cost
that is based on our own first-hand knowledge of what
scholars and students think is a reasonable price for a
piece of software for people on their limited
budgets. (Or at least the scholars are usually on
limited budgets, and I assume the same must be true of
many students, in spite of the number of Land Rovers and
BMW's I see on campus.) Sure, making money is great
and all that, but we also run into the people who buy our
software on our campuses and at our professional meetings,
and so what we are doing is a part of our relationship to
a larger community that means a lot to us.
We are committed to keeping our products high-quality,
our prices reasonable, and our business overhead
small. It certainly helps for a small company that
we came along at just the moment when the Internet allowed
for software sales and downloads without investing in a
large sales and distribution infrastructure. But we
also know that the best advertising in academia is
word-of-mouth.
One of the downsides to working off our own resources
and keeping the operation small is that we cannot field a
large support operation. We outsource our sales
transactions to some very capable people who have their
own 800 number operators standing by to provide assistance
with sales or with installing our product. But we
are not able to provide our own phone staffing for support
calls. Hence we ask instead that you communicate
problems to us by email, and check newsgroup resources for
existing information.
IntelliGents is not looking for venture capital, is not
selling stock, and does not intend to seek an IPO.
We are open to overtures for licensing or co-marketing our
product.
Steven Horst, Ph.D.
Founder and President
