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Of course, IBM vice president Jeff Crigl
er added software to his political repertoire along the way. Duarte, in fact, had a lot to do with that. In the early 1980s, congressional delegations were visiting Duarte in increasing numbers. Crigler remembers 57 delegations in one summer alone. So Crigler says he came up with replication technology similar to what is used today in Notes. Every night Duarte saw an updated database with information about every member of Congress, their children and their spouses, their voting record and who contributed to their campaigns. Then, Crigler sold the service to the Democratic National Committee and the AFL-CIO. Finally, he sold the whole business to Lexis/Nexis, where he became director of business information services. When Lexis/Nexis declined to listen to Crigle
r's ideas for a new distributed intellectual-property framework, Crigler went to IBM's Louis Gerstner, who tucked the strategy neatly into IBM's network-centric model.
Today, IBM is clearly ahead of the pack in defining how intellectual property m
ay be bought and sold over the Internet--where many sellers decline to put their wares for fear that such products will be widely distributed without recompense. Today, IBM claims to be the Internet's largest supplier of intellectual property, through a packaging concept known as Cryptolopes. Encrypted information is treated as an object in a container, which contains access and use rules. Users have been able to find the information by relying on IBM's infoMarket service, a multi-database, multi-search-engine approach (initially developed by Booz-Allen & Hamilton to aid NATO countries in sharing information). An information abstract then describes the information and related charges, if any. IBM operates the clearinghouse for the service, though it plans to license that technology to others.
But Crigler remains a man with a mission. His goal over the next 12 months is to evangelize Cryptolope and infoMarket search application programming interfaces, so that IBM's technology finds its way into
Java and ActiveX environments, and correspondingly into applications for word processing, browsers, e-mail and IBM's own Notes. Sources say Crigler is also working on a new Web search engine, code-named Mantis, to be announced this fall. It will give users access to commercial information alongside Web content and includes a Java front-end and support for Virtual Reality Markup Language.
Crigler says he expects to see Cryptolopes put to some new uses in the near term. One use is as a sales vehicle for limited-edition items and collectibles, such as comic books and stamps. Another is for multi
level marketing--where one person gets a product free by virtue of getting a set number of other people to sell it. Crigler believes Cryptolopes will be used to track such distributor arrangements.
So, what's next on the ho
rizon--after Central American politics and re-engineering the Internet?
Well, there's one more area dear to Crigler's heart--a kind of nesting instinct. When his wife was expecting, Crigler built a dinner set complete with eight chairs. In fact, he built about half the furniture his home. Crigler says he'd like to start a furniture company someday. Perhaps he could sell his limited edition work via Cryptolopes.
Contribution Last 12 Months: Cryptolopes, making high-value information available on the Web
Next 12 Months: Embedding container/search technology in application environments
Millennium Forecast: Information dial-tone, making it as easy to find information as it is to pick up the phone and call grandma in Oklahoma today
Millennium Disturbance: As dependence on the Net increases, crime, piracy and terrorism will transfer to it
Car: A green 1995 Alpha Romeo 164LS 3-liter (one of 300 in U.S.); purchased for wife who rarely gets to drive it
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