Vision
" We are entering the era of web 3.0, a new age of intelligent and proactive internet services ".
Interview with Grégory Renard, founder of xBrainLab and xBrainSoft, co-founder of Usilink Group.
Our mission :
To create tools that will speed up the sharing and spreading of "collective intelligence" in order to make it accessible and useful to everyone".
Resources :
- xBrainLab, the Innovation Lab of Usilink group, where xBrainSoft comes from: http://www.xbrainlab.com/
- Grégory Renard’s blog, co-founder and CEO of xBrainSoft: http://gregoryrenard.wordpress.com/
History
In the name "xBrainSoft" - the "x" stands for "exo". We are working on technologies and products that are in fact "exoBrains", in the same way that research works on exoskeletons.
Personal assistants, on Smartphone or in the House, are the exoBrain of the future : memory, functional, pro-active assistants.
IAS is a platform allowing to create this kind of "exoBrains" in the second decade of the 21th century.
Back on the steps of the creation of IAS :
1997 : Grégory Renard was working on applications for information distribution, leading to the : creation of a first intelligent Agent engne allowing for a vast knowledge base to become accessible and evolve...
End of the 1990's : it becomes clear that the web servers, HTML listeners based on a reactive mode, won’t be enough in the future to answer the Internet needs. Sooner or later it will be necessary to create "Informational and functional servers". Grégory Renard provides the theoretical basis of what IAS will be: An information and tasks server.
2003 : Creation of Wygwam, a team of Microsoft experts, founded by Grégory Renard and Grégoire Malvoisin. The beginnings of IAS R&D.
2004 : In order to develop IAS-like R&D projects, Wygwam put the basis of the future xBrainLab, a Research & Innovation center specialized in ambient Intelligence and new interfaces.
The goal was not to create Conversationnal Agents, as manay players on the market do, but also to make IAS into a conversation and functions server that would be able to manage actions for users : send an email, notify the user of an appointment, etc. We called this type of services “functional Agents”, which were later called "Digital Intelligence" services.
2006 : Sebastien Warin, now CTO of xBrainSoft, join the R&D team led by Gregory Renard and hosted by Wygwam. Sebastien start working on the architecture of the platform which was going to become IAS (Intelligent Agent Server). At this moment, the target is to create an open platform for companies and provide the development tools for developers.
A first application of Digital Intelligence is released, called Watson, the avatar for the city of Waterloo in Belgium. (See video)
2007 : Creation of the first prototype of intelligent House, called Nestor.
2008-2009, in the world : on December 2008, NTT DoCoMo, a Japanese leader in mobile operators, launches its virtual Assistant, iConcier. This service gained success quickly with 3 million (paying) subscribers by the end of 2009.
The startup Siri launches its application, based on 10 years of research of DARPA. A year after, while Siri only had 200 000 users, the company was bought out by Apple.
At that time, it becomes clear that we had to accelerate our research, and that the 2010s would be the one of Internet intelligent services.
2010 : Creation of the IAS team (technical, ergonomic, Vision, Marketing, Sales) in order to prepare its launch.
2011 : Launch of the first industrial and commercial version of IAS (Intelligent Agent Server) and introduction to large operators and system integrators.
Do you want to learn more? Or see a demo of IAS? Contact us !