Jiglu is driven by a passion to help people work more effectively by making sense of the information they use and the conversations they engage in

Successful business has – and will always be – about connecting the right people with the right information: account managers with sales opportunities, marketers with emerging trends, research and development with potential collaborators. Understanding how business thrives on communications has been fundamental in the way the Jiglu enterprise collaboration software was developed. We think it's about time technology finally caught up with what happens in the real world.

The Jiglu products are developed by Dynamic Discovery Ltd, a London-based software product company with a team that has deep experience of managing content, collaboration and semantic analysis.

Jiglu's name comes from the words ‘jigsaw’ and ‘glue’, a combination that underpins the technology's approach to providing structure to unstructured data, creating an overall and meaningful picture of the content puzzle.

The company

The idea for the Jiglu product came from the company's founder, Stephen Hebditch. In his earlier work at Mediasurface, the content management company he co-founded in 1996, he had been frustrated by two challenges which the content management and collaboration products of the time failed to address. First, too many tried to force users into new ways of working, ignoring also where knowledge transfer occurred most in an organisation: e-mail. Second, they were dumb solutions that simply moved data around – they did nothing to understand or extract additional value from the content that they stored.

From this initial vision, the company developed its first collaboration product, initially under the Kinomi name and with several engineers from Mediasurface. Significant work took place on developing and refining its proprietary Dynamic Discovery automatic tagging, classification and contextual threading engine. Funding from Norway-based private investment fund Fritas A/S, UK early-stage investors Oxford Technology 4 VCT and a small number of angels enabled the company to ramp up marketing and sales activities. Although it gained some customers in the collaboration space, the product was ahead of the UK market and its traditional sales model did not match the customers who would be its best fit. To try and gain traction Kinomi pivoted through e-mail archiving, a consumer communities service, an automated blog tagging widget and finally social media monitoring before operational and financial issues took it into liquidation.

Convinced that his original concept was still valid and seeing others now having success in the same sector, Stephen Hebditch founded a new company, Dynamic Discovery Ltd, and bought the intellectual property that Kinomi had previously owned. Guided by a small number of customers the product has now been reworked, rebuilt and extended for the user experience, technologies and customer requirements of today. We think the new Jiglu is the best thing we've ever built.

Product development takes place entirely in-house with no outsourcing, ensuring the product remains innovative and meets the quality and security standards that our customers demand.

The company is majority owned by Stephen Hebditch with smaller stakes held by members of its team and some of the previous investors in Kinomi.

The team

The founder

Stephen Hebditch founded the company and is responsible for the vision, technology direction and user experience of the Jiglu product.

He has been working on community-oriented hypertext systems since 1989 and was previously the co-founder and CTO of Mediasurface, Britain's best-known content management company, later bought by Alterian and now part of SDL. There he helped create many of the core concepts that are now an established part of content management in a product rated highly by analysts for its completeness of vision.