WHY ZET UNIVERSE
When one looks at the modern world, one of the first things she immediately sees is the increasing complexity of everything:
All these changes require us to learn and adapt to the new world, and as it was said by the Red Queen in the classic “Alice in the Wonderland” (by Lewis Carrol), to simply stay where you are you should run, and to run you should run twice faster. This is applied to all aspects of our lives, including both personal and professional ones.
For instance, one has not only to get a formal education, but to continue being on top of the chosen field, and for that, tracking of new articles, works, theories, practices is, indeed, the necessary ingredient of success. Even to keep being relevant in the organization one has to be in know of what’s happening inside the organization, and, even more important, to be in the know of the organization’s business, whatever it would be, and its customers. We are no longer simply acquiring knowledge, friends, customers, instead, we create and connect to networks of knowledge, friends, and customers.
- organizations that spread across the entire world adapting to the needs of the local economies and cultures;
- simple jobs being taken by computers and robots rendering remaining jobs increasingly more complex, requiring us to learn entirely new things every day;
- network economics changing the entire concept of ownership and rent, collaborative work, and productivity.
All these changes require us to learn and adapt to the new world, and as it was said by the Red Queen in the classic “Alice in the Wonderland” (by Lewis Carrol), to simply stay where you are you should run, and to run you should run twice faster. This is applied to all aspects of our lives, including both personal and professional ones.
For instance, one has not only to get a formal education, but to continue being on top of the chosen field, and for that, tracking of new articles, works, theories, practices is, indeed, the necessary ingredient of success. Even to keep being relevant in the organization one has to be in know of what’s happening inside the organization, and, even more important, to be in the know of the organization’s business, whatever it would be, and its customers. We are no longer simply acquiring knowledge, friends, customers, instead, we create and connect to networks of knowledge, friends, and customers.
In other words, to keep up with the ever growing complexity of the today’s economics and our own lives, we became the nodes in the modern networks. For instance, we are connected to our families, to our employers, to our colleagues and management, we are connected to our customers, and friends, and to information sources, and we not only track changes in all of these networks, but we also influence on these networks.
There are myriads of different tools that allow us to create, maintain and expand our networks, be that Facebook for personal and business communications, LinkedIn for maintaining professional connections, Quip to keep being connected to our teams and customers, or Dropbox to keep track of changes in team documents.
To get things done in the modern world, we solve problems by creating projects defined by goals and plans, resources, doing the work we can, and involving our networks to get things done that we can’t do alone. And as the number of people and resources increases, our projects naturally span across these networks. We start businesses, and with that we create teams in Dropbox, we use Facebook pages and groups to acquire and communicate with customers, we use the power of our LinkedIn networks to bring new professionals into our teams.
Unfortunately, tools that allow us to use these networks, also being so effective in what they are designed for, fall short when they become mere tools for our projects. These tools rarely work with each other, and as the market is so fragmented, different teams and organizations use different tools aiming at solving the same problems, be that Gmail or Exchange for email, Google Docs or Microsoft Office for documents and collaborative work, Yammer or Jam for corporate social networks, etc. To succeed, we are forced to keep up with all of these systems, no matter of our own personal preferences or choices.
To keep track of our projects we have to manually maintain connections between elements living in these networks in order to keep the fabric of our projects intact. The old way of complex all-in-one project management solutions no longer works in the era of BYOD and BYOS (bring your own services), as people happily use consumer services like Dropbox and Skype, Box and Google Hangouts at work, and transform entire teams into adepts of these services. The modern solution to this problem is provided by three kinds of products: rule-oriented services like IFTTT and Zapier, personal/team-oriented integration systems like Slack, and, finally, complex systems like Palantir Gotham or Quid. Despite all the differences these systems have, they have a common trait that is quickly becoming the relevant answer to the ever increasing complexity of the modern economics: with them, you get a chance to integrate different data sources with each other, semi-automatically organize them by your projects, track changes, and see your projects as you see them.
Each of these systems, however, have their own weaknesses. IFTTT and Zapier require a lot of micro-management and care about maximizing the number of rules you create to automatically integrate data between different systems; these services can’t give you a bigger picture of your work, yet alone help you to manage it. Slack provides you with a linear data representation, requiring you to be always connected to teams’ message threads in order to be in the know; Slack doesn’t give you a bigger picture of your projects as well, and it’s not in its best interest. Finally, systems like Palantir Gotham require a dedicated team of data scientists working together with the so-called forward deployment engineers to install, configure, data mine, and prepare corporate information for further data analysis in their specialized software.
There are myriads of different tools that allow us to create, maintain and expand our networks, be that Facebook for personal and business communications, LinkedIn for maintaining professional connections, Quip to keep being connected to our teams and customers, or Dropbox to keep track of changes in team documents.
To get things done in the modern world, we solve problems by creating projects defined by goals and plans, resources, doing the work we can, and involving our networks to get things done that we can’t do alone. And as the number of people and resources increases, our projects naturally span across these networks. We start businesses, and with that we create teams in Dropbox, we use Facebook pages and groups to acquire and communicate with customers, we use the power of our LinkedIn networks to bring new professionals into our teams.
Unfortunately, tools that allow us to use these networks, also being so effective in what they are designed for, fall short when they become mere tools for our projects. These tools rarely work with each other, and as the market is so fragmented, different teams and organizations use different tools aiming at solving the same problems, be that Gmail or Exchange for email, Google Docs or Microsoft Office for documents and collaborative work, Yammer or Jam for corporate social networks, etc. To succeed, we are forced to keep up with all of these systems, no matter of our own personal preferences or choices.
To keep track of our projects we have to manually maintain connections between elements living in these networks in order to keep the fabric of our projects intact. The old way of complex all-in-one project management solutions no longer works in the era of BYOD and BYOS (bring your own services), as people happily use consumer services like Dropbox and Skype, Box and Google Hangouts at work, and transform entire teams into adepts of these services. The modern solution to this problem is provided by three kinds of products: rule-oriented services like IFTTT and Zapier, personal/team-oriented integration systems like Slack, and, finally, complex systems like Palantir Gotham or Quid. Despite all the differences these systems have, they have a common trait that is quickly becoming the relevant answer to the ever increasing complexity of the modern economics: with them, you get a chance to integrate different data sources with each other, semi-automatically organize them by your projects, track changes, and see your projects as you see them.
Each of these systems, however, have their own weaknesses. IFTTT and Zapier require a lot of micro-management and care about maximizing the number of rules you create to automatically integrate data between different systems; these services can’t give you a bigger picture of your work, yet alone help you to manage it. Slack provides you with a linear data representation, requiring you to be always connected to teams’ message threads in order to be in the know; Slack doesn’t give you a bigger picture of your projects as well, and it’s not in its best interest. Finally, systems like Palantir Gotham require a dedicated team of data scientists working together with the so-called forward deployment engineers to install, configure, data mine, and prepare corporate information for further data analysis in their specialized software.
WHAT IS ZET UNIVERSE?
Zet Universe is a project communications dashboard. It allows you to track changes happening across the networks your projects connect with.
Zet Universe provides you with a place where you can integrate all the data sources (like Dropbox, Gmail, or Exchange), semi-automatically organize them by your projects, and track changes in your projects on the everyday basis.
Unlike services like IFTTT and Zapier, Zet Universe brings the power of augmented intelligence, learning from your daily interaction with project information, and helping you to semi-automatically build visual maps of your project data.
Unlike Slack, Zet Universe doesn’t require you to constantly check the channels inside your organization, allowing you to work in the occasionally-connected scenario.
Unlike Palantir, Zet Universe doesn’t require dedicated data scientists’ teams deployed at your enterprise, instead learning the ontologies of your projects by offering you tools to define visual maps of your projects.
Such time-proven technologies as keyword, entity, and concept extraction, dynamic ontologies, as well as good old rules (used universally as the built-in features of Outlook and Gmail and in the form of the dedicated services like IFTTT and Zapier), coupled with our version of the semantic steering technology will allow you to keep your projects under control.
Our goal is to help each and every person who works on multiple projects that span across different networks to get their projects organized, and keep them under control. With that, we will keep gradually updating our product, making it your personal intelligent assistant, which, unlike popular alternatives, is focused on helping you to become productive in your work, not leisure.
Zet Universe provides you with a place where you can integrate all the data sources (like Dropbox, Gmail, or Exchange), semi-automatically organize them by your projects, and track changes in your projects on the everyday basis.
Unlike services like IFTTT and Zapier, Zet Universe brings the power of augmented intelligence, learning from your daily interaction with project information, and helping you to semi-automatically build visual maps of your project data.
Unlike Slack, Zet Universe doesn’t require you to constantly check the channels inside your organization, allowing you to work in the occasionally-connected scenario.
Unlike Palantir, Zet Universe doesn’t require dedicated data scientists’ teams deployed at your enterprise, instead learning the ontologies of your projects by offering you tools to define visual maps of your projects.
Such time-proven technologies as keyword, entity, and concept extraction, dynamic ontologies, as well as good old rules (used universally as the built-in features of Outlook and Gmail and in the form of the dedicated services like IFTTT and Zapier), coupled with our version of the semantic steering technology will allow you to keep your projects under control.
Our goal is to help each and every person who works on multiple projects that span across different networks to get their projects organized, and keep them under control. With that, we will keep gradually updating our product, making it your personal intelligent assistant, which, unlike popular alternatives, is focused on helping you to become productive in your work, not leisure.
ROADMAP: THE BIG PLAN
Building a product of such scale is, by all means, not an easy task, and we have a plan spanning across several years to deliver on our promise. Due to its nature, Zet Universe isn’t a simple application, but is a full platform which provides various extension points to introduce integrations with new data sources, as well as to introduce new data processing modules, making it possible to adapt Zet Universe to the needs of our immediate customers in different industries by utilizing own software development capabilities.
2015 H2
SEPTEMBER
By the end of September, we will deliver a first piece of our SDK to allow our first customers and developer community to start building integrations with their data sources, ranging from FTP and network shares to on-premises systems like SharePoint.
OCTOBER
By the end of October, we will bring first tools aiding in automated data clustering based on both document similarity and visual content groups defined by the end users.
NOVEMBER
By the end of November, we will bring the rules engine which will allow use of individual data item properties to further automate data integration and visualization in the product.
DECEMBER
Finally, we will spend the last month of this year to further stabilize the platform and consider including our customer-developed integrations back into the main product, to make these solutions available to all customers.
2016 H1
In 2016, we will bring a first-class implementation of integration with one of the premier corporate data sources, opening the door to the first product deployments in the enterprise. We will also continue enhancing our data processing subsystem by bringing more and more data processing modules utilizing technologies such as entity and concept extraction, sophisticated dynamic ontologies, and sentiment analysis.
We will also start shipping commercial versions of Zet Universe to the respective customers.
We will also start shipping commercial versions of Zet Universe to the respective customers.
2016 H2
By the end of the 2016, we plan to provide at least two more first-class implementations of data integrations with the most widely used productivity products. We will continue further enhancing the product quality, as well as nailing down our algorithms for data change tracking, integration, analysis, and visualization.
IN CLOSING
This is our first ever published roadmap of the product and we ask you to accept it with the grain of salt. As other plans, this one will go through many iterations, and the dates and features described in the roadmap might change significantly over the course of the next year and half.
This plan was built in collaboration with our Insiders, advisors, and the team, and we want you to understand that this is the living document, that will be updated in order to reflect our updated vision and schedule.
This plan was built in collaboration with our Insiders, advisors, and the team, and we want you to understand that this is the living document, that will be updated in order to reflect our updated vision and schedule.
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