THINGLINK FOUNDING STORY: CONNECTING THINGS TO MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THEM

For most of my working life, I’ve been interested in finding new ways to connect the things in our physical environment to more information about them. After doing a masters in product development and international marketing, I joined a PhD program at the University of Helsinki to get a broader and deeper perspective on how and why we make and build things. Then I dropped out to build the Internet of Meaningful Things, and change the way we use images to navigate between the physical and digital worlds.

Developing, not only new technology, but a new way for people to interact with images, has been a journey through and towards the unknown. Here is my story of how I started ThingLink and built a team for making the world more accessible with a layer of links on top of it.

Phase 1: Hyperlinks and the problem of the Invisible Tail

In 2005 the Internet was changing in fundamental ways. It was the dawn of personal publishing: anyone could start their own blog, and link to another resource on the Internet by writing <a href=”https://www.any linkadressintheinternet.com">Link Name</a>.