Icesheets
ICESHEETS is a brand new spreadsheet technology that combines the power of a large database with the ease of use of a spreadsheet. It gives a user the ability to view and access to multiple data sets in the same spreadsheet. Information such as monthly statements, financial reports, cost breakdowns, multiple experimental data, and many more can all be embedded within a subset of cells in one worksheet allowing the user easy access for calculations, corrections, and analysis.General Information
Personal computers are growing in power faster than there are applications to effectively use them. The spreadsheet is said to have created the PC market by providing business with a compelling reason to use a personal computer. In a world of gigabytes of RAM and multiple processor cores per PC there are no compelling applications that can exploit this computational power.
A very large spreadsheet with 10,000 items (unusably large) will occupy less than 1/1000th of the memory in a modern personal computer. A modern personal computer could store easily store one million financial transactions in less than 20% of its RAM. A 2GHz processor can touch every transaction 500 times in less than one second. This is just in terms of today’s devices. Computers with up to 32 processors are in design for commercial release yet spreadsheets, the mainstay of interactive calculation, cannot possibly exploit this power.
The Market
The business approach is not to take on EXCEL or Lotus directly. These are very entrenched businesses with loyal customer followings. However, there are many people with interactive computational needs. They people are generally served by Matlab or the statistics language R. Both of these handle large data with linear algebra and similar computational methods. However, both of these, and their less well known cousins are command-line based. Neither of them have the user interface that spreadsheets provide. This is the market that we want to target. We want to provide significant computation with a simple interactive metaphor that is easy to reuse.
The first prong of the strategy would be to identify niche markets such as financial analysis, economics, engineering, chemistry, physics and provide ICESheet plugins that address those markets. This targeted approach lets us fulfill specific needs while fleshing out the breadth and depth of ICESheet functionality.
The second prong is to partner with hardware vendors that are selling computational add-on boards for PCs. These boards multiply the computational power of a normal PC by many times. However, they are hampered by the lack of tools for PC users to exploit their power. Implementing an ICESheet plugin that sits on top of the board’s computational library would allow them to sell to many more PC users and provide us a path to market that no other spreadsheet would have.
The third prong is cluster computing. Because ICESheets can deal with very large, highly parallel data it would be easy to build a set of functions that would divide up their processing among a large number of processors.
The Product
ICESheets provides a three pronged solution that meets the computational opportunity.
1. Each spreadsheet cell can contain an entire spreadsheet as its value. This allows functions to be written that return large complex values. Such functions include all of linear algebra, most of the functionality of Matlab or R, database operations like select, project and join. Many machine learning algorithms are easily embodied as spreadsheet functions once the single-value barrier is breached. The spreadsheet now becomes a real power tool for data analysis, engineering, economics, physics and financial analysis. Such functions can be parallelized to use multiple processors effectively without users needing to know multi-processor programming.
2. A model that is designed within a spreadsheet file or within a single spreadsheet cell can be reused and reapplied to many other data operations without copy and paste. This allows work to scale up to big problems without as many mistakes or hand labor.
3. The functions and the data presentation mechanisms are completely extensible. New functionality is easy to add and easy to adapt to niche markets. The application defines an ecostructure like Photoshop or browser plugins that can be enhanced in a large aftermarket.
Type of Offer: Licensing
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