Automation backbone

Cognitive load

As Microsoft Exec explains in the video below, enterprise apps must do 1000 things a typical user doesn't care about. At the same time, the competitive pressure on these enterprises' apps would force them to add even more features, making it even harder for users to figure out how to access the functionalities they care about.

The complexification of enterprise applications cannot go on. Something would have to give. Some new kind of interface, a new programming model, or a new abstraction that reduces the cognitive load on enterprise app users. One approach would be to bury the app's complexity under a conversational facade. However, this is a coping mechanism and even feels like we are regressing to the familiar 'command prompt.'

Personification of spreadsheets

To truly make a business app that feels like a consumer app, one has to look at the app designed for a business called VisiCalc; now, we may call its progeny Excel. I have seen people immersed in their spreadsheets and playing with them for hours. However, spreadsheets are esoteric for regular people, designed for single-person use, and require desktop-size screens to navigate and play. To bring the playfulness of spreadsheets to the impatient mobile web users, we have to change how they interact with spreadsheets instead of a keyboard, mouse, and desktop display. Just plain vanilla texting!

We propose a consumer-enterprise app that fuses spreadsheets and messaging. The spreadsheet is in the background, and you are messaging the spreadsheet as if the spreadsheet were a human. This personification of the spreadsheet retains the simplicity of messaging but brings the magic of the spreadsheets to the users bound to their mobile phones.

A personal automation example

Let us take an example. Imagine sending your spreadsheet messages about all the food you ate during the day, and in the background, the spreadsheet is updated with a breakdown of macro and micronutrients. Now you have a personal database about your food habits, and you can ask the spreadsheet, 'Compared to last month, how much more carbohydrates did I eat this month.'

Let us augment this conversational app a little more without losing the toy-ness. Let us also put all our exercise data into the spreadsheet. Why stop there? Let us put our weight, blood pressure, sleep time, wake-up time, TV viewing time, work time, and everything you can imagine.

You can use this data to figure out why you gained 3 pounds last week conversationally.

Small and medium enterprises

Imagine this consumer-enterprise app as the automation foundation for small and medium enterprises. Plugins into this app would allow access to data from existing software services and devices.

Four hundred million micro, small, and medium enterprises desperate for automation would welcome this new abstraction. There is no learning curve for these adopters, and our consumer-enterprise app would be low-cost, easy to change, and quick to evolve with their business, just like spreadsheets. We can create a conversational do-it-yourself-kit to program spreadsheets and make it easy to create conversational apps.

Big picture

On top of this platform, we are building a community of 50,000 conversational app developers who would automate these hard-to-reach 400 million MSMEs. We foresee this automation approach perfected within the dynamic and competitive space of 400 million MSMEs to become standard practice for the Global 5000 companies with a large community of developers integrating their legacy enterprise apps into this global conversational backbone.

neome memory system

The human brain would be stretched beyond its cognitive ability to comprehend an exponentially evolving world. This cognitively loaded wetware would need assistance from some external hardware to augment its processing capacity. Creating an alternate memory system that records, remembers, suggests, and guides the human brain through life choices is a survival necessity in business and personal life.

neome is such a memory system and provides the conversational automation backbone to an enterprise of any size.