Frode Hegland, MSc.
The Economist article Rummaging through the internet said
The web has changed in many ways since it first emerged in the mid-1990s. The first web pages contained only text, and there was a big debate about whether pictures should be allowed. Today, by contrast, it is quite normal for pages to be bursting with photos, animated graphics, video clips, music and chunks of software, as well as text. In one respect, however, the web is unaltered: the clickable hyperlinks between pages are still the way users get from one page to another.
But now a Norwegian computer scientist named Frode Hegland has cooked up a new sort of navigation. His free software, a browser add-on called Hyperwords, makes every single word or phrase on a page into a hyperlink — not just those chosen by a website’s authors. Click on any word, number or phrase, and menus and sub-menus pop up. With a second click, it is possible to translate text into many languages, obtain currency or measurement conversions, and retrieve related photos, videos, academic papers, maps, Wikipedia entries, and web pages fetched by Google, among other things.
Frode Hegland, MSc. is CEO at
The Hyperwords Company.
Frode previously designed the
Liquid Information Email & Usenet
Newsgroup system and more recently
LiSA.
He also produced a documentary on Doug Engelbart, available to
view on
the web or as video podcasts.
Frode graduated from Syracuse University with an advertising degree
in 1994 and
got his masters in Human Computer Interaction from University College
London Interaction Center in 2004.
Born in the revolutionary summer of 1968, he is originally from Norway
and currently lives in the UK.
Frode is living the dream of making text more interactive, information
more liquid, he is now a founding director in The Hyperwords Company
where he is he working to revolutionize how we interact with each other
though text on computer systems. So far the company has produced a
Firefox Add-On with 100,000 daily users, a mobile phone version on the
INQ1 handset for the 3 network, a server version and a Windows version
is in Beta.
Vint Cerf,
“the father of the Internet”, said
Innovative! Creative! Energetic! Self-starter! Never gives up! These are all descriptive of Frode Hegland. He shows all the characteristics of an entrepreneur with a bee in his bonnet and the determination to achieve his objectives. I have been impressed with his skills and have greatly enjoyed my interactions with him in connection with Hyperwords, the company he serves as CEO.
Watch Program for the Future — Collective Intelligence Challenge and A Fire From a Spark.