The history of the contextual diary (Codi)
Trisent Ltd, launched on 6 th May 2016 to develop Codi, the self writing diary. The Codi name comes from Co ntextual Di ary which was the name of a project that began in 2006 although the origins can be traced back to 2004 when the company Trisent Communications Ltd was first established in Scotland.
The following history gives the background to the original Trisent company and the first Contextual Diary, both direct descendents of new Trisent company and the Codi app.
The founder of Trisent, Dr Gordon Povey completed his PhD in mobile communications at the University of Edinburgh in 1992 and took up a lecturing post there. He completed a number of consulting roles in mobile communications including with BT, Nokia and Elektobit in Finland. In 1999 he set up Elektrobit (UK) Ltd a partially owned subsidiary of the Finnish Elektrobit Group (now called Bittium) with Dr Stephen Churcher who had studied for his PhD alongside Gordon.
Elektrobit UK was successfully run with Gordon as managing director and Stephen as Technical Director until 2003 when Stephen decided to spin out the integrated circuit development expertise into his own company called Dukosi. Then in late 2004 Trisent Communications Ltd was established by Gordon as a managent buy-out from Elektrobit (UK) Ltd. Staff, assets and also intellectual property (including a patent), were acquired via the MBO. 
The technology and expertise of primary interest to Trisent Communications was in the field of mobile phone location technology. At that time the mobile phone and network technology was pretty clunky and continuous accurate location was a technical challenge, and so the company focused on perfecting this. However, the Trisent vision was wider than being a continuous location aware service provider. The Trisent name actually derives from Tri-Sentient – being aware of 3 things: where, when, what, or, put simply, context aware. When developing the technology over 10 years ago most effort was spent on the where i.e. on location since this in itself was a technical challenge. However, they did create a context aware demo application called the Contextual Diary that sparked considerable interest, indeed it was actually found to be useful to those that tried it. However, very few people had smart phones and data networks were expensive so it remained an internal project used to demonstrate the potential value of Trisent’s continuous location technology.
Based on its continuous location technology Trisent Communications became profitable and in early 2008 was sold to AIM listed Artilium plc. They had a vision of Mobile Presence applications which aligned well with Trisent’s vision of Context Aware applications. Unfortunately the vision, which may well have a little to far ahead of the market and technology capabilities, was never fully realised after the Artilium CEO driving Mobile Presence left in 2009. Gordon left Artilium in 2010 but that vision of what could be done with Context Aware applications remained with him.
After almost 6 years of working as CEO in early stage technology companies, Gordon realised that Context Aware technology is on the cusp of become a massive market and made an agreement with Artilium to buy back the rights to the Trisent name. In their 2014 book, Age of Context, Scoble & Isreal talk about 5 forces [technologies] that come together. “Together, they have created the conditions for an unstoppable perfect storm of epic proportion: the Age of Context”. On 6th May 2016 the new Trisent company was launched and has been developing new context aware technology in the form of Codi, a much revised version of the original Contextual Diary.
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