Seamless Capture and Discovery for Corporate Memory

In a landmark article, over a half century ago, Vannevar Bush envisioned a “Memory Extender” device he dubbed the “memex” [7]. Bush’s ideas anticipated and inspired numerous breakthroughs, including hypertext, the Internet, the World Wide Web, and Wikipedia. However, despite these triumphs, the memex has still not lived up to its potential in corporate settings. One reason is that corporate users often don’t have sufficient time or incentives to contribute to a corporate memory or to explore others’ contributions. At FXPAL, we are investigating ways to automatically create and retrieve useful corporate memories without any added burden on anyone. In this paper we discuss how ProjectorBox—a smart appliance for automatic presentation capture—and PAL Bar—a system for proactively retrieving contextually relevant corporate memories—have enabled us to integrate content from a variety of sources to create a cohesive multimedia corporate memory for our organization.