Irvine Firm’s New Software Program Helps Users Find a Way to Solutions : SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY
You might call it the “Rain Man” of the computer software field.
A new Irvine company has developed a software program that, in a sense, remembers almost anything but understands practically nothing. Just like the autistic savant character portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the Academy Award-winning movie.
The software is the creation of Fisher Ideal Systems, a company formed last year by Marshall D. Fisher, a co-founder of Irvine-based Century 21 International, the giant real estate brokerage chain. Fisher said he has devoted 12 years of research and $3.5 million to the program, which the company began marketing earlier this year.
Fisher is the company’s president and chief executive. His son Jess serves as project director.
Marshall Fisher describes IdeaFisher as a kind of electronic brainstorming session in which the computer helps stimulate a person’s creative thinking process by taking the user through a series of questions and answers.
The program consists of a huge database of 60,000 cross-referenced elements--words and phrases representing concepts and images--divided into various categories and sub-categories.
The database was compiled over the past 12 years with the help of more than 200 “industry specialists,” Fisher said.
“Our questions don’t try to tell you what part of a widget to replace, but are designed to open you up and get you thinking about all the options you might pursue,” Fisher said. “It’s designed to diverge your thinking, not give you a magical solution.”
The Irvine firm is marketing the program to corporate marketing, advertising, product research and development departments “or any place where creative problem-solving is involved,” Fisher said.
Another potential market is in education. A school district in Moses Lake, Wash., has tested the program for use in the classroom and administrative offices. Fisher’s firm has supplied copies of the software to more than 70 other businesses and other potential users, hoping to work out any bugs in the program.
Fisher Systems began marketing the $1,795 program a few months ago and has sold just 15 copies so far. But Fisher believes the program has considerable potential.
At least one industry expert agrees.
Esther Dyson, an influential computer industry analyst, said IdeaFisher has “tremendous potential utility . . . as a memory jogger for creative people.”
After watching a recent demonstration of the program, Dyson wrote in her industry newsletter, Release 1.0, that IdeaFisher “simply supplies a thinker with associations he knows and understands, but may have forgotten. In other words, it reminds you of what you already know, but doesn’t teach you anything. It says, ‘If you’re thinking about Russia, did you think about Gorbachev, and Red Square, and piroshki, and communism and. . . .”
