Welcome. We (Julian, Simon and myself) decided to start this blog to give you some insight into what we are doing here at Omnisio. While we can’t say too much yet, we are very excited to be working on some cool technologies that will transform the way people share knowledge and learn online.

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be providing limited private beta access to some of our early features, so keep your eye on this blog or sign up to be notified.

In the mean time I want to set the stage with some thoughts on the ‘big picture’ of learning.

The amount of new knowledge being created by humanity is increasing at an exponential rate. Researchers at UC Berkeley estimate the amount of new information created each year is increasing by 30% a year, and that 5 exabytes of new information was created in 2002.

Consequently the number of new ‘concepts’ we need to learn and understand as humans living in society is growing at a similar exponential rate. If we hope to be able to advance the state of the art in any given field, we need to understand what has already been discovered which means over time we will have to learn and understand more and more concepts. In 300 BC great thinkers like Aristotle had basically a ‘green field’ opportunity to think about the nature of the world. Today, thousands of papers are published in academic journals each year - the scientists and engineers of today need to understand a great deal more ‘prior art’ before they can make meaningful contributions.

The upshot is that we appear to be heading towards a future where there are too many concepts for one person to learn in a lifetime. Does this mean that people will be forced to specialize? This would be sub-optimal since a great deal innovation occurs by ‘cross pollination’ of ideas from one field of study to another. One example is the field of nanobiotechnology - created by cross-pollination of ideas from the fields of nanotechnology and biotechnology, and growing at a faster rate than either of these two specializations.

Our position at Omnisio is that this problem will instead be solved with technology.

Time and time again, across all industries, technolgy has allowed us to ‘jump to a new curve’ whenever we find the current curve to be providing decreasing marginal improvements. In the same way, technology will enable a shift in the way we learn. Imagine a future where an intelligent agent, backed by a database of all human knowledge, is able to provide on-demand knowledge to a student, customized to his or her current level of knowledge, preferred learning style, and desired learning goals.

This future may not be as far away as we think, and Ominsio hopes to play a part in helping us get there.