Services October 17, 2024

I offer advisory services to companies that want an edge in forecasting future technological trends.

There are some people who label themselves as professional “futurists”, give talks, write books, etc., But as far as I am aware, none of them have equivalent track records to mine for actually being (at least arguably) first at actually creating specific real-world innovations. Accordingly, if you have a need for advice on such matters, I would suggest that we talk, to see whether what I can offer is a match for you.

The list that follows contains my most prominent firsts. If these interest you enough to wish to speak with me, there is more I will be happy to share.

I am almost certainly the first person to have determined the need for the tracking cookie and to also have figured out how to actually create one on a technical level. (Tracking cookies are the reason why web sites now ask permission for cookie use.)

In a 2021 joint legal brief issued by Google and Twitter, they referred to it as “Robinson’s Cookie”.1 The patent which discloses the tracking cookie, for which I am the sole inventor was owned by Google in the years before it expired.2

See my blog post for a complete discussion.

Collaborative Filtering For Recommendations

In 1986 I had collaborative filtering in active commercial use in the context of a voice mail-based dating service, where there was a need to recommend personals ads to individuals based on their past choices within the service. Because of that work, I got a call out-of-the-blue from Jeff Bezos in 1996 to discuss my CF technology; Amazon was getting to the point that it needed recommendations and he knew CF’s importance for that.

I still have the Intel 8086 assembly language source code for what I believe is the very first implementation of collaborative filtering, or if not, the first commercially-used one. In any case, I can find no reference to an earlier implementation.

As Wikipedia describes it:

The motivation for collaborative filtering comes from the idea that people often get the best recommendations from someone with tastes similar to themselves. Collaborative filtering encompasses techniques for matching people with similar interests and making recommendations on this basis.

Meta-Analytical Techniques for Spam Filtering

Some award-winning spam filters, including SpamAssassin3, SpamSieve, and SpamBayes have used a statistical methodology I spearheaded using techniques from the statistical field of meta-analysis. See my Linux Journal article which discusses it.

Current Work

I am developing a fundamentally new type of blockchain, called EoPCoin.

  1. See, for example, the first line of page 40 in the legal brief jointly filed by Google and Twitter in 2021 in which they refer to it as "Robinson's cookie"

  2. https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/c3/d4/40/239073914fa7fc/US5918014.pdf

  3. See "Thanks, Gary!" in SpamAssassin's credits file