Q&A with William Dale Koehler, President, CEO and founding partner of As It Is, Inc., the company that developed TrueThinker. These questions and their respective answers come from previous press conferences, Q&A sessions at symposia where Bill has presented papers on behalf of As It Is, Inc., and from the many TrueThinkers around the globe. (Visit www.ai3.com for more information on As It Is, Inc.)

q. If you only had 20 seconds to describe www.truethinker.com, what would you say?

a. TrueThinker^TM is the world's first web-based intelligent website. It will change the way knowledge is organized, sought from the Internet, co-created and shared virtually person-to-person as well as via on-site communities. Through general Artificial Intelligence, TrueThinker helps Internet users efficiently save, organize, and share their documents and website links. It learns by studying what users save and how they organize information, using a patented AI application called the AutoGnome^TM.

q. What are the technology and concept behind TrueThinker?

a. By formal definition the technology is Synthetic Intelligence based on Automated ("Mechanized") Semiosis, a promising breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence. A major difference between the AutoGnome and most other AI-based Internet applications is that the AutoGnome creates its own knowledge structure without human intervention. Most other AI Internet knowledge-management applications require that humans develop a data structure before they are useful.

Today, “semantic web” is considered the next state of the art for new Internet tools. The term “Artificial Intelligence” also is used in regard to new Internet tool development. As TrueThinker evolves through its planned versions over the next few years, the semantic web will be but one level of AI functionality.

With TrueThinker, the evolution of the Internet might look like this, where the AutoGnome is the technology that will enable Web 7.0:

1. Web 1.0 Syntactic Web.
	Has been available for several years.
	The “original” Internet. Deals with the structure of symbols.
	No automated tools for sharing knowledge.
	Searches based on spelling or structure.

2. Web 2.0 Syntactic-based Social Web
	E.g., MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn.
	Available now.
	Social networks enable sharing of information, but still are based on the Syntactic Web.

3. Web 3.0 Semantic Web
	(the current hype for new search tools such as Hakia or Twine). Available mostly in Beta form now.
	Includes Web 2.0 features, plus the ability to seek and organize information based on meaning, rather than just structure.

4. Web 4.0 Semantic-based Social Web.
	Future availability.

5. Web 5.0 Pragmatic Web.
	Future availability.
	Internet information searched and organized based on the context of information usage.
	The Pragmatic Web consists of the tools, practices, and theories describing why and how people use information. In contrast to the Syntactic Web and Semantic Web, the Pragmatic Web is not about form or meaning of information. The transformation of existing information into information relevant to a group of users or an individual user includes the support of how users locate, filter, access, process, synthesize, and share information.

6. Web 6.0 Pragmatic-based Social Web.
	Future availability.

7. Web 7.0 AutoGnomic Web.
	Available now in early form through TrueThinker.
	The AutoGnomic Web holistically incorporates the Syntactic, Semantic, and Pragmatic functionalities and anticipates a new computing paradigm.

q. How does TrueThinker work?

a. The current version of TrueThinker has three prime components - My TrueThinker, My KnowledgeBank, and My Communities. These each allow users to organize and manage all of the website links, as well as files, that they wish to store, or to share with their Communities. TrueThinker delivers three key capabilities: knowledge organization (learning), knowledge creation (thinking), and knowledge applications (acting). With its unique and novel AutoGnomic foundation for these functionalities, TrueThinker will evolve into the ubiquitous product that will transform the computer into an effective learning, thinking, and acting machine.

The My TrueThinker webpage serves as a Daily Dashboard or homepage that users can personalize as their portal to the internet. The My KnowledgeBank page is where users manually or automatically – via their trained AutoGnome – store their selected relevant and valued information for easy retrieval. The My Communities page is where users join or organize groups of people with the same social, business, research, or other common interests in order to share resources and hold discussions, publicly or privately.

q. What benefits does TrueThinker provide to users?

a. Because TrueThinker users can create their own private or public communities to collect and share information, users:

	and quickly increase knowledge in their areas of interest.
	Access their TrueThinker-organized bookmarks and files from any computer.

Users can organize their bookmarks and files, and they can access these from any computer. As they use the AutoGnome, TrueThinker’s underlying technology learns how they organize and classify information, so that TrueThinker can do this for users after an appropriate learning period. TrueThinker users can build online communities to organize and share knowledge.

TrueThinker is not a search engine. It is a means for Internet users to organize and personalize how they use the information they can acquire from – and share on – the Internet.

q. How hard is it to train the AutoGnome technology that resides in TrueThinker™?

a. Every time you conduct a search and save a URL into one of your folders, you are training TrueThinker™. Simply stated, you train it just by using it, which teaches it what is relevant to you from information you select from search engine data.

q. How long did your beta phase last for TrueThinker™?

a. We have several thousand subscribers who have been working with us for the past year. I imagine that we will always be in a form of "beta" since we believe that TrueThinker™ is a "living" product. After all, our goal over the next several months is to convert our subscribers’ computers into learning/thinking machines. Our technology will continue to develop as will the various applications that we'll incorporate into TrueThinker™.

q. I know that most companies aggressively protect any information about their proprietary technology. You must have the same concerns?

a. Obviously there is much that will be protected. However, we also believe in open participation so we will be encouraging and supporting contributions from an open-sourced approach to many parts of our developing artificial intelligence specification.

q. Having endured the necessary start-up phases of ideation, creation, incubation, funding and now commercialization, are you thrilled at the prospect of growing a business?

a. YES! But I should caution you that we don't subscribe to the past model that measures the success of a company by its number of employees or by its profits. Our open-participation philosophy extends beyond the boundaries of technology development. The Web/Internet is a virtuality that has a creative class of contributors growing exponentially, daily. We want to co-create and cooperate in every sense. We believe that we will have thousands of virtual associates working with us in concept collaboration, invention, development, design, distribution, marketing and economic development. TrueThinker™ will allow everyone access to technology where they can create value locally and globally. It will level the playing field by providing the technology that allows all users to access information, enhance their exposure to new knowledge and advance wisdom

As far as profits and earnings per share go, we will always endeavor to maximize our potential for our shareholders while adhering to a Native American philosophy reminding us that to effectively hold water in your hand you must keep it open.

q. I noticed that you don't have advertisers or sponsors on TrueThinker™. Is that by design?

a. We don't like the clutter, and we don't believe our subscribers do. Ironically we may end up being the ultimate advertising vehicle for companies. Any person, organization or business can become a TrueThinker™ subscriber and then create a community in which they can place as much information about themselves as they want. They can send an invite to any and all of their loyal customers and invite them in. Imagine a company like Ford opening an account, creating a F150 Pickup community and then inviting every past and current F150 owner to join and enter the community. Companies spend millions for a small print ad or a commercial, when they can have a dedicated product community for less that $25 for a whole year--and reach a targeted, proven buyer. As TrueThinker™ grows companies with TrueThinker communities could reach millions of prospective new buyers.

q. Will you have a referral program?

a. Yes. In keeping with our open participation philosophy, we will introduce a very aggressive referral program so that all aspiring entrepreneurs can e-trepreneur under the TrueThinker™ umbrella. TrueThinker™ is a complete business-in-a-box. All any person, organization or even any viral marketing entity has to do is become a TrueThinker™, get a referral code and pass it on. Every time someone subscribes and enters a referral code the referrer will receive a 50% commission. It won't take long for TrueThinker™ to spawn a whole new generation of e-millionaires who operate in virtuality. Not-for-profits will be able to raise operating funds, and students will be able to help pay for their tuitions just by referring subscribers to TrueThinker™.