As enterprise supply chains and consumer demand chains have beome globalized, they continue to inefficiently share information “one-up/one-down”. Profound "bullwhip effects" in the chains cause managers to scramble with inventory shortages and consumers attempting to understand product recalls, especially food safety recalls. Add to this the increasing usage of personal mobile devices by managers and consumers seeking real-time information about products, materials and ingredient sources. The popularity of mobile devices with consumers is inexorably tugging at enterprise IT departments to shifting to apps and services. But both consumer and enterprise data is a proprietary asset that must be selectively shared to be efficiently shared.
About Steve Holcombe
Unless otherwise noted, all content on this company blog site is authored by Steve Holcombe as President & CEO of Pardalis, Inc. More profile information:
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KPCB's iFundTM is a $100M investment initiative that will fund market-changing ideas and products that extend the revolutionary new iPhone and iPod touch platform. The iFundTM is agnostic to size and stage of investment and will invest in companies building applications, services and components. Focus areas include location based services, social networking, mCommerce (including advertising and payments), communication, and entertainment. The iFundTM will back innovators pursuing transformative, high-impact ideas with an eye towards building independent durable companies atop the iPhone / iPod touch platform.
Just now getting around to it, but here's my submission on behalf of Pardalis.
Please describe the market opportunity as you see it. Include information on the unmet market need, market size estimates, and unique features of the market that are relevant to your venture.
The first information bank is operating in North Dakota for the members of the CalfAID USDA PVP program. This is a member-trusted program that keeps verifiable pedigree information connected with animals as they make their way through a complex, owner-segmented food supply chain. CalfAID recognizes that there are now two products being produced along agricultural supply chains (1) the traditional farm product, and (2) a new, informational product. Build to the Cloud from trusted institutions and groups. Measure the economic impact upon family farms who will now for the first time be compensated not just for their traditional farm products but also for their informational products. Measure the impact upon the emerging Semantic Web that without an adjacent informational banking infrastructure will have virtually no opportunity to bargain for access to information that that participants to complex supply chains consider to be confidential.
Please describe your solution. Focus on how it is unique and distinctive from other similar solutions.
People are comfortable and familiar with monetary banks. Without people willingly depositing their money into banks, there would be no banking system as we know it. Without a healthy monetary banking system our economies would be comparatively dysfunctional, and our personal lives would be critically deficient in opportunities. Imagine empowering people with data ownership similar to the trustworthy, granular control they have over depositing and spending their banked money. What is technologically required is a flexible, integrated architectural framework for information object authoring and portability. One that easily adjusts to the definition of data ownership as it is variously defined by the data banks serving each information supply chain and product supply chain. The lowest common denominator will be the trusted, immutable informational objects that are authored, controllable and traceable by each data owner one-step, two-steps, three-steps, etc. after the initial port.
Please describe your technology and any proprietary intellectual property you have developed or intend to develop. Focus on how it is unique and distinctive from other similar technologies.
Pardalis holds a significant, global portfolio intellectual property (IP) uniquely designed for virtually integrating information and product supply networks that are not otherwise vertically integrable. Pardalis holds two U.S. patents that will enforceable until at least 2021, a pending U.S. continuation patent, and now four international patents issued by Australia, China, Mexico and New Zealand.Similar patents are pending in Brazil, Canada, Europe, Hong Kong, India, and Japan. Significantly, Pardalis' parent patent has been distinguished from prior art held by IBM, Microsoft, and SAP AG, all of which generally apply to the runtime efficiencies of immutable objects. Also distinguished from Pardalis' IP has been a seminal 1993 Xerox patent pertaining to collaborative data authoring and sharing. For further information begin with the blogged entry US Patent 6,671,696: Informational object authoring and distribution system (Pardalis Inc.) at http://www.pardalis.squarespace.com.
Please describe the competitive landscape. Include details how you are different from each of the competitors named.
Here's one example. Metaweb Technologiesis developing technology for a semantic ‘knowledge web' marketed as Freebase ParallaxTM. Philosophically, Freebase Parallax is a substitute for a great tutor, like Aristotle was for Alexander. Using Freebase Parallax users do not modify existing web documents but instead annotate them. Freebase Parallax links the annotations so that the documents are more understandable and more findable. In the spirit of statistical reliability, annotations are also modifiable by their authors as better information becomes available to them. Metaweb characterizes its service as an open, collaboratively-editeddatabase (like Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) of cross-linked data but it is really very much a next generation competitor to Google. As Freebase strives to become the premier ‘knowledge web', it will need access to new, reservoirs of data. Without a new Ownership Web infrastructure, such trustworthy information will forever remain missing or incomplete.
That's the substance of my submission. FYI, the submission form did not allow entry of hyperlinks or the addition of font emphasis, as I have included above in this blog entry. Also the limit was 1,000 characters (including spaces) for each of the four descriptions, above. For a more robust submission, see and compare CNN: Got an idea to help the world? Here's $10 million.
As reported in FoodProductDaily.com on 10 October 2008:
A new report from the UK’s Food Ethics
Council claims that one of the ways to cut food’s environmental
footprint is for consumers to cut down on what the Council says are
energy intensive foods like meat and dairy ....
In response, Philip Hambling, Food Policy Manager, the British Meat Processors Association (BMPA)
said that while the Council’s report usefully highlights some of the
complexities around environmental protection, including the tensions
between local and central sourcing, it does not recognise that issues
around sustainability have been taken seriously by the entire chain for
some time ....
The following excerpt is from The Economist article published 27 September 2008:
In November 2002 news reports revealed the existence of a big, secret Pentagon programme called Total Information Awareness. This aimed to identify suspicious patterns of behaviour by “data mining” (also known as “pattern recognition”): computer-driven searches of large quantities of electronic information. After a public outcry it was dubbed, perhaps more palatably, Terrorism Information Awareness. But protests continued, and in September 2003 Congress blocked its funding.
That, many people may have assumed, was that. But six of TIA’s seven components survived as secret stand-alone projects with classified funding. A report in February by America’s Department of Homeland Security named three programmes it operates to sniff out suspicious patterns in the transport of goods. Similar projects have mushroomed in, among other countries, Britain, China, France, Germany and Isreal ....
The following is the introduction to a CNN article published Wednesday, 24 September 2008:
Got an idea that could change the world, or at least help a lot of people? Google wants to hear from you -- and it will pay as much as $10 million to make your idea a reality.
To help celebrate its 10th birthday, the ambitious Internet giant is launching an initiative to solicit, and bankroll, fresh ideas that it believes could have broad and beneficial impact on people's lives.
Called Project 10^100 (pronounced "10 to the 100th"), Google's initiative will seek input from the public and a panel of judges in choosing up to five winning ideas, to be announced in February ....
For the complete article, go to Got an idea to help the world? Here's $10 million. I did and then I clicked over to Project "10 to the 100th" and submitted my idea. Below is the substance of my proposal. Hyperlinks were not permitted in the submission but I've nonetheless included a few in this blog entry. Also, the numbers 1 through 7 cover identification information, etc., and are not included below.
8. Your idea's name:
Banking on Information Ownership
9. Please select a category that best describes your idea.
[selected] Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
10. What one sentence best describes your idea?
Empower people with data ownership similar to the trustworthy, granular control they have over depositing and spending their banked money.
11. Describe your idea in more depth.
People are comfortable and familiar with monetary banks. That’s a good thing because without people willingly depositing their money into banks, there would be no banking system as we know it. In order to make profits, banks bargain and pay with money and services for access to people’s money. Without a healthy monetary banking system our economies would be comparatively dysfunctional, and our personal lives would be critically deficient in opportunities.
Imagine the opportunities going unfulfilled because there is no similar information banking system arising in the Cloud. There is no similar integrated system existing for precisely and efficiently delivering our medical records to a new physician, or for providing access to a health history of the specific animal slaughtered for that purchased steak. Nothing out there compares with how the banking system facilitates gasoline purchases. While our monetary banking system granularly processes the exact amount of the checks we write, the tools currently being used by information technology companies would imprecisely and inefficiently ‘pay’ for your $35.62 tank of gas by cleaning out your entire bank account. Got $3,434.99 in your checking account? That’s what would be ‘paid’, and then it would be left up to the gas station to give you change for $3,399.37.
Wells Fargo formed in 1852 in response to the California gold rush. Wells Fargo wasn’t just a monetary bank, it was also an express delivery company of its time for transporting gold, mail and valuables across the Wild West. While we are now accustomed to next morning, overnight delivery between the coasts, Wells Fargo captured the imagination of the nation by connecting San Francisco and the East coast with its Pony Express.
Today’s Web needs information banks that do for the on-going gold rush on information what Wells Fargo did for the Forty-niners.
12. What problem or issue does your idea address?
The monetary banking system exhibits several key characteristics:
Security: A physically safe place to store money. Also, government regulations insure continuity of deposits when banks go bankrupt.
Credibility: Banks handle people’s money like they say they will in order to continue maintaining and attracting deposits.
Compensation: Again, In order to make profits, banks bargain and pay with money and convenient personal and Internet services for access to people’s money.
Control: Customers granularly deposit their money, withdraw it or transfer it when they choose.
Integration: Banks provide a critical component to a very complex web of communications involved in our everyday transactions. In the U.S., a strong central banking system, the Federal Reserve System, has been critical in that regard.
Verification: By regulation and by practice, banks verify that monies deposited with them are legal tender and not counterfeit.
Today’s Web needs information banks that do the same.
13. If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how?
The old adage that ‘possession is nine-tenths of the law’ well applies to many fields like that of food safety, product tracking along complex supply chains, the tracking of people’s movements or Internet clicks, or the compilation of purchasing habits. But let’s take personal health records as a bell-weather example. Everyone - the hospitals, the doctors, the insurance companies, government agencies, consumer groups - claims to speak for the patients. But who really speaks for the ‘property-less’ patients? America is in the middle of a political stalemate vis-à-vis the efficient collection, storage and sharing of medical records. Ownership begets economic change which begets political voice. A national information banking system that granularly empowers patients with technological portability and control – not just HIPAA confidentiality protections - over their own medical information would provide an opportunity for firing the imagination of patients that brings real change.
14. What are the initial steps required to get this idea off the ground?
The initial steps are already being made. Patents are being globally secured. The first information bank is operating in North Dakota for the members of the CalfAID USDA PVP program. This is a member-trusted program that keeps verifiable pedigree information connected with animals as they make their way through a complex food supply chain that is highly dysfunctional when it comes to information sharing. The director of CalfAID recognizes that there are now two products being produced along agricultural supply chains (1) the traditional product, in this case an animal, and (2) an informational product. The bottom line: build to the Cloud from trusted institutions and groups. TRUST COMES FIRST, THEN COMES TECHNOLOGY BUILT FOR PRESERVING AND EMPOWERING THAT TRUST. Then, imagine further that the families of the members of the CalfAID program would have interest in using the same trusted technology for porting their personal health records.
15. Describe the optimal outcome should your idea be selected and successfully implemented. How would you measure it?
There would be several measuring sticks. For instance, measure the economic impact upon family farms who will now for the first time be compensated not just for their traditional farm products but also for their informational products. For instance, measure the political impact upon people’s lives when they finally are empowered with the choice of technological control over their information properties as they have long experienced over their monetary properties. For instance, measure the impact upon the emerging Semantic Web that without an adjacent informational banking infrastructure will have virtually no opportunity to bargain for access to information that people consider to be their identity, that participants to complex supply chains consider to be confidential and that governments classify as secret. Without such a new infrastructure, such trustworthy information will forever remain missing or incomplete.
16. [skipped]
17. [skipped]
18. If you'd like to recommend a specific organization, or the ideal type of organization, to execute your plan, please do so here.
Again, build to the Cloud from trusted institutions and groups.
My brother, Scot, and I traveled to North Dakota last week for meetings in Dickinson, N.D. (in southwest North Dakota) and Fargo, N.D. (southeastern North Dakota on the border with sister city, Moorhead, MN). Leaving Oklahoma we traveled north through Kansas, spent the night in North Platte, Nebraska. The next day took us by the Black Hills of South Dakota and Mt. Rushmore. If you have never been there, it's definitely worth the stop. I hadn't realized that the four President's gazed out of the Black Hills toward the east and a vast sea of prairie. We also drove on some beautiful, shoulderless 'blue' highways like that of Highway 85 between Belle Fourche, S.D. and Belfield, N.D. If you love the movie Dances with Wolves, you'll love this stretch of scenery. Lots and lots of pronghorn antelope, too. And Redig, S.D. really is one of those 'towns' with one house sitting on a rail straight road stretching endlessly into the distance. No kidding.
But, I digress.
For those of you who think you are unfamiliar with complex supply chains, allow me to jog your memory because you actually know more than you think you do. Spinach. Lead painted toys. Mad cows. Tomatoes. Jalapeno peppers. Hamburger. What do they all have in common? They are products that originate at the frayed ends of lengthy (even international) supply chains beset by many, many fears related to information sharing. And they are products that have been deemed poisonous (lead paint) or unhealthy (contaminated with e. coli, the prions that apparently cause BSE, or salmonella). Actually, the tomato industry got hammered this summer and they weren't even at fault. But take a look at some of the wonderful, free advertising the tomato industry received before the FDA called off the dogs.
What is the value of immediately accessible, credible, supply chain information? If it incontrovertibly points to you and your business as the culprit in a food disease crisis, for instance, then, yes, you are limiting your options. But if your company uses best practices in its crop management and limits its risks in advance, the value of credible information at your fingertips in a disease crisis is to immediately distinguish your company from (a) the actual culprits, and (b) all other companies who perform best crop management practices just like you but can't provide credible information for months. In fact the damage is not measured in months but in hours. Unfortunately, within hours the damage to reputation has been seeded into the minds of wholesale buyers and retail consumers. And without your ability to immediately provide exonerating information, the government regulators are going to 'play it safe' and cast a broad net that unfortunately ropes in a lot of innocent parties.
Information is like a sword. Unfortunately, if you don't firmly grab the sword and make it cut for you, in a crisis the sword will be out of your hands and you will potentially be sliced to death in the name of 'public health'.
The Dickinson Research Extension Center of North Dakota State University (NDSU DREC) is the first land grant extension center, and perhaps still the only one, to operate a beef livestock age and source verification program sanctioned by the USDA. It's called the CalfAID USDA PVP (i.e., process verified program employing RFID ear tags) and it's managed by NDSU DREC for the real cattlemen of the North Dakota Beef Cattle Improvement Association. The Agro-Security Resource Center at Dickinson State University also makes a significant contribution. It's partly research driven (with Congressional funding) and partly market-driven. It's market-driven in that those real livestock producers pay a fee per animal out of their pockets with the expectation that they will receive greater dollars (i.e., premiums) later on that the market pays for credible information about those calves. The CalfAID PVP exists to keep the calves connected with their age (i.e., birthdate) and source (i.e., origin) as each calf winds its way along an otherwise 'information dysfunctional' supply chain.
How dysfunctional is the information sharing? The U.S. has a national herd of about 100 million cattle. There's about a million cattle operations of one sort or the other. The vast majority of calf producers don't know where their calves eventually end up being slaughtered. Most packers don't know from what ranch or farm the animals they slaughter originated from. It's pretty much the same as it was in the 19th century. Most products (i.e., the livestock) are pushed one-step at a time as 'as is' commodities along a supply chain in which each segment only sees one step back, and one step forward. It's kind of like standing in a bucket line helping to pass along that bucket of water to put out a fire. You know who is passing you the bucket, and you know to whom you are passing it on. But in the beef industry, chances are you don't know where the fire is or even where the water is coming from.
In order to set the stage for scaling out from tracking thousands of cattle to tracking potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions of cattle, NDSU DREC has adopted a web service for their supply chain that empowers livestock producers to do with their cattle data what the following jazzy video envisions for social networks.
The web service, patented and engineered by Pardalis, is called a 'data bank' and it's coded in .NET with SQL server architecture on the back-end (though I would be very interested to see an open source, adjacent Linux system similarly funded and architected from Pardalis' IP as a data bank for the social networking space).
Common Point Authoring ModelSo how exactly does the 'data bank' work. To the right is the information model for the Common Point Authoring system (CPA) - that's the name that Pardalis has used in its most recent patents. You can also compare this image with other views, images and information about the CPA system to be found elsewhere in this blog site. Within the CPA system data cannot be changed once set (i.e., registered) so that the data can be used for verification and certification. Or, put another way, Pardalis has transformed the traditional application of immutable objects beyond run-time efficiencies, and empowered end-users with tools for granularly authoring, registering, controlling, and sharing these immutable objects.
The end-users 'own' and directly control sharing rights over what they author and register (or automatically collect and register), they just can't change it once it's authored. It becomes a part of a permanent, trustworthy record of the bank albeit controlled by the author. Other data bank account holders who receive any information from another data bank account holder know that. And they can remix it with their own data, and further share it, permission being granted to do so by the original author. This all helps build confidence, data credibility and, especially, trusted communication where it did not exist before. It provides a means for supply chain participants to reap benefits not just from their traditional products, but now also from their informational products. And, yes, there's no free lunch. The government might very well be able to subpoena those electronic records in their quest to protect the public's health. But they do the same with traditional monetary banks, too, don't they?
Now there are a number of technological ways to accomplish the same thing, it's just that Pardalis' object oriented approach provides certain long term advantages in terms of scalability, efficiency and granularity in 'the Cloud' that match up extremely well to an emerging Semantic Web. And you don't have to take my word for it. See, for example, the blogged entries, Efficient monitoring of objects in object-oriented database system which interacts cooperatively with client programs and Advantages of object oriented databases over relational databases. And Pardalis’ granular information banking system provides a substantial head-start in the race toward the standardization of a metadata platform for what I call an Ownership Web.
Online encyclopedias like Metaweb's Freebase Parallax are beginning to roll out tools for semantic search and semantic visualizations of publicly accessible information. See the nifty video clip in Freebase Parallax and the Ownership Web. Others like Google, Yahoo! , and Wikipedia will follow. The intrinsic value for connecting these search engines and encyclopedias with the Ownership Web will be the opportunity to likewise empower their authenticated end-users with the same semantic tools for accessing information that people consider to be their identity, that participants to complex supply chains consider to be confidential, and that governments classify as secret.
But, again, I digress.
Here's a film clip demonstrating the the authoring and portability of immutable data objects along the beef livestock supply chain. The interface is neither sexy nor jazzy. But it is effective. This type of look and feel makes sense for the beef livestock supply chain as Microsoft Excel is familiar to a large percentage of cattle producers (at least the ones who have moved on from pencil and paper). Currently, there's no audio because, frankly, I've provided the audio 'live' when called upon to do so. If you, too, would like a verbal walk through, drop me an e-mail. Or, in the alternative, I've scripted a written walk-through that you can download, print and follow as the clip runs its course. If you want to see a full screen version, click on the hyperlinked text below the graphic to take you to the Vimeo website.
In the coming months the data bank will be used not just to track the data uploaded and ported by CalfAID members, but also for helping to keep data connected with the animals from other age and source programs, and probably even for COOL compliance, too.
Once again, there's way more to the data bank than its application to the beef industry. As Dr. Kris Ringwall, Director of NDSU DREC, said in Fargo to a large vegetable growing company during a live demonstration of the data bank, "whether it's an animal or a vegetable, it's a product with a pedigree".
Well, that may be more of a paraphrase than a quote, but I know that Kris in this Presidential campaign season would nonetheless 'approve this message'.
Update on Thursday, June 3, 2010 at 11:28PM by
Steve Holcombe
The activities in North Dakota with CalfAID have been suspended. The livestock industry is struggling to find its way when it comes to animal identification. See the New York Times article dated 5 February 2009 USDA Will Drop Program to Trace Livestock in which USDA Secretary Vilsack announces the termination of the National Animal Identification System.
But the activities in North Dakota have by no means gone to waste.
In November, 2009 Pardalis joined with North Dakota State University, Oklahoma State University, Michigan State University, and Top 10 Produce LLC in a grant application filed in January for a Specialty Crops Research Initiative Coordinated Agricultural Project under USDA-NIFA-SCRI-002672. The essential premise of the $5M/5YR SCRI application was that providing supply chain participants (including consumers) with more control (i.e., traceability) over their data will increase the availability and quality of product data, and open up new, sustainable business models for both large and small companies. Though we received notice on 1 June 2010 that we would not be funded, here's what one reviewer had to say:
"Although [the application] addresses a topic area clearly of importance to Homeland Security, the FDA, and of course to USDA, the proposed traceability-system project, as written, could be used just as well for widgets as for fresh produce .... [But what] funding program within USDA or between the interested federal agencies mentioned above could be a better home for this proposal?
The "widgets remark" was right on target. We were indeed attempting to get across in our application that there is now an increasing critical need for bringing infrastructure standardization and uniformity to agricultural traceability in general, and not just for specialty crops supply chains.
Undeterred, the 'SCRI team' is committed to a process of filing applications, and two letters of intent have been filed under the Agricultural and Food Research Initiative, CFDA No. 10.310. They are entitled Stakeholder driven food supply safety system for a real-time detection, risk assessment, and mitigation of food borne contamination (Program Area Code: A4121 of the AFRI Food Safety RFA) and Stakeholder driven food supply safety system for a real-time detection, risk assessment, and mitigation of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli in beef products (Program Area: A4101 of the AFRI Food Safety RFA). Funding for each is potentially up to $25M/5YRS.
And academics from additional universities are coming on board. So are new stakeholders in ag supply chains. The snowball is rolling faster down the hill. Getting bigger. Gaining momentum.
Update on Sunday, October 30, 2011 at 6:50PM by
Steve Holcombe
Wednesday, October 22, 2008 at 10:07AM 
