Jacques Vallee is President of Eurolink International, a California venture capital organization that manages over $43 million dollars in two funds dedicated to high technology investments. Among Eurolink's recent successes are software companies like Mercury Interactive and ISOCOR, hardware firms like P-Com, and Electronics for Imaging, and biotech enterprises like SangStat Medical.But Jacques Vallee is not a typical venture capitalist newly converted to the marvels of technology. Trained in France as an astrophysicist, he came to the U.S. to do science, quickly fell in love with computers, built the first database for the Network Information Center (NIC) as a senior engineer with Doug Englebart's lab at SRI and served as a principal investigator for ARPA in 1973, when the Net was still a baby.
No wonder Vallee and his partners were the only American VCs who invested in Ubique, a startup that demonstrated a Web-based conferencing system in 1993. (It was acquired eighteen months later by America Online).
Unafraid of taboo subjects ("It's my job to look beyond the technical horizon," he says), Vallee has been awarded the Jules Verne Prize for his first French science fiction novel and he makes no secret of his interest in the frontiers of science. His views on the future of Web groupware are unconventional but -- unlike other authors' speculations based on hype or on visions of doom -- they are rooted in hard business experience.
"Whatever we think of the Web, it will drastically influence the way groups work together, and that may be its deepest impact," Vallee told Omni. "Today's electronic mail, useful as it is in everyday business, is not a good model for what's coming; chat rooms are at best a transitory form of intellectual contact, at worst mere evanescent posturing. The most basic tools have yet to be conceived. We are about to witness a collision between forms of human behavior that have remained unchanged for millennia and communications modalities we can only scramble to master. The level of innovation will be stunning."
Home || Prime Time || Live Science || Machine Dreams || Project Open Book || SF-Fantasy-Horror
Continuum || Antimatter || Mind-Brain Lab || Interactive IQ || Gallery || OMNI ToonsQuestions, comments and suggestions can be mailed to the webmaster.
Copyright (C) 1997 by Omni Publications International, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.