When did you first understand the power of information?

The moment that changed my life happened in 1982 when Scientific American devoted a seminal issue to software. Alan Kay wrote that to be successful in the future, people would need to be able to operate computers as easily and skillfully as they drive a car. At the time, the only people who knew anything about computers were glow-in-the-dark guys like me, who were studying engineering. Looking back now, it's amazing how accurate his prediction was.

What led you to start Jaman?

Somewhere in my travels I realized there is an amazing amount of quality content independent films and documentaries being produced everywhere, yet less than one percent of films get traditional distribution. At first, I had some righteous indignation about it, thinking, "How can this be? How come nobody's done anything about it?" And then I thought, "Maybe I should do something."

So I decided to create a business that provides an alternative distribution channel. Jaman's focus is to serve this under-served area: providing high-definition quality, making it work on Macs and PCs and set-top boxes. With that foundation, we believe we'll be able to add on more and more content.

What role do independent and foreign films play in our culture?

Companies that came out of that generation were post-mainframe companies but pre-Internet companies. The Internet didn't exist, and the way information flowed was very much in rows and columns; a database is nothing more than the biggest spreadsheet you ever saw. Today, information takes on many more forms; it's richer, and it no longer lines up in orderly rows and columns.

With the web being this connector that hooks anything to anything, we're now trying to understand the implications of interconnectedness. I think that will be the next quantum leap. If you look at Alan Kay's statement in 1982 about computer skills being necessary in the future, having social information and connectedness skills in the future will be as important as computer skills are today.

What tools do you use to manage your personal data?

Actually, I'm trying to unhook myself from BlackBerry. It was getting to be a problem. It was always with me. I wasn't thinking enough about the big picture because I was always in interrupt mode. So I unplugged it in the middle of last year. Any withdrawal symptoms have been outweighed by the positive reinforcement in my personal life. When I'm home, I'm a better father because I'm focused on my kid. And at Jaman we have developed interrupt protocols—based on the immediacy of communication—that make everyone more productive.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by too much information?

In the early days of business intelligence, we had this joke about "endless adventures in drilling." You can keep drilling into the data. But if you think about the hierarchy of information, knowledge, and wisdom, experience teaches you not to seek information but knowledge. So the question is how do you "go meta"? And how do you follow the Einsteinian notion of rising above the observation level to get insight into what's causing something to happen?

When I'm swimming in a sea of information, I look for a rock to climb up on so I can look out and see "What's the pattern? Which way are the waves going? Is a storm coming?" That kind of insight and knowledge is an antidote to too much information.