AYLIEN's story (so far)
The word "intelligence" derives from the Latin "intelligere," which meant to comprehend or perceive. In these terms, the web as we know it is far from intelligent. Tim Berners-Lee famously highlighted the modern web's limitations when he outlined what he saw as its next iteration, the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is comprised, as is today's web, of machines and data. The fundamental difference in what is and what will be is the ability of those machines and data to converse with each other, to share information freely to achieve better ends.
That all sounds fairly boring and abstract, but it's what gets us out of bed in the morning. The Semantic Web excites us because we see its implications, the possibilities that arise from a more intelligent web. One such possibility is the reason we exist. A few years, ago, our founder, Parsa Ghaffari, wanted to build a platform that would automatically pull relevant data without the publisher (blogger, journalist, etc.) having to lift a finger. So if, for instance, an historian was blogging about the date of a battle in the Revolutionary War, he wouldn't have to stop writing to look it up; it would simply be there.
The idea took off. Ghaffari got some funding and headed to Chinaccelerator to begin the process of making his tool a reality. An interesting thing happened, though, while attending the program: he learned that the underlying technology he needed to develop the idea simply didn't exist. Parsa realized that, for all its capabilities, the web was still very much in its infancy. If he was to build his tool, he would first have to change the web itself.
And that's exactly what he decided to do.
This is the premise from which AYLIEN was born. We're not a suite of apps, or a tool for publishers. We are a movement. We are what happens when a hacker's passion perfectly align with the needs of the modern world. Simply put, we want to build an intelligent web. Everything we make centers around this simple premise. Our APIs allow data to be extracted from a text, or from the entire web, with surgical precision. Our publisher tools eliminate unnecessary friction between publishers and their audience. Our consumer apps will change the way we interact with the web. Data on the web will be linked, and it will be smart. It will know what you want, and it will bring it to you.
This is the premise we've been working under for the past three years. We've been building our vision, and now we're ready to unveil our creations.
Right now, the web is a ransacked library. Books are all over the floor, entire bookshelves have collapsed under the weight of their own contents. The data is there, but it’s scattered, it’s chaotic, it’s insanely inefficient. Think of us, then, as your friendly neighborhood librarian. We’ll bring order to the chaos. We’ll clean everything up, and then we’ll do so much more. When you, or a machine on the web, or even another piece of data, need something, not only will we retrieve it for you, we’ll do it before you ask.
That is our mission, and we take it seriously. Not too seriously, though—don’t get us wrong—we’re going to have a ton of fun doing this, and the journey's only just begun. We hope you’ll come along for the ride.
