Just what the world needs: Yet Another Blog. And a CTO blog at that; surely there are enough CTO blogs from real CTOs in huge conglomerates like Intel, Microsoft , CapGem and Sun? (There’s even a generic CTO blog for generic CTOs). Getting a more-or-less company-sanitized view from the Big Names can be interesting in a vicarious way. They’re so far up the tree they must be able to see a long way. But I sometimes get the feeling that they’re a long way from the action; that layers and layers of middle management cloud, polarise and distort the picture. After reading one too many pieces where the goal seemed to be to name-drop as many times as possible, we decided to start something new rather than just moan about the shortcomings elsewhere.

So this is Calico Jack’s CTO blog. We work in an exciting area, blending three areas of tech: multi-agent systems (a newish way of doing massively parallel distributed computing that is just starting to make it out of its academic kennel), nonclassical logic (think rule engines that don’t break), and convergent comms (traditional telephony plus every type of messaging with a focus on the mobile). It’s a unique mix that gives a small company like Calico Jack a very specific take on emerging trends, and offers me an opportunity to get a picture that is informed by the landscape of the market (that Paul focuses on) but has the resolution that you can only get by having access to the detail of the technology. It is this picture that I hope to share with you through this blog.