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In 1963—before the Internet, before the desktop computer, and when “mobile device” often meant roller skates—Marshall McLuhan dropped a bombshell on the world of communication: “The medium,” he proposed, “is the message.” In time, and after much head-scratching, nail-biting, and soul-searching, many people grudgingly conceded that how a message is transmitted is at least as important as the message itself.

But things are beginning to change.

McLuhan made the daring claim that (loosely translated from the Canadian) the real content of any medium is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The content of television is not the antics of suburban families or the exploits of superheroes, but the hours reserved for passively watching them. The content of e-mail (he would say) is not the reminder of a dental appointment but the fact that we check it 150 times a day. The content of a Tweet is not an epigraphic editorial, but the fact that our heads are permanently cocked at a 45° angle looking at our phones.

The implication of all this is inescapable. As McLuhan rather bluntly put it, the notion that technology is neutral and what matters is what we do with it is “the numb stance of the technological idiot.” That’s actually a pretty fair characterization of where things now stand, but maybe we have reached an inflection point. Maybe, after a long technological interlude, we are finally poised to reverse that fateful course and return the hardware to the back room from whence it came, and make the software disappear.

At Entefy we see McLuhan’s famous dictum not as a fact to be accepted, but a challenge to be overcome. We are developing technologies that will return the human being to center stage, and restore the immediacy of face-to-face, person-to-person communication. Ideas, information, inspiration, intimacy—isn’t this really what we are after?

The Battle of New Orleans was fought between forces under American General Andrew Jackson (later President Jackson) and British General Sir Edward Pakenham on January 8, 1815.

What neither Jackson or Pakenham knew was that the U.S. and Britain had already agreed to peace terms and signed the Treaty of Ghent two weeks earlier. Because of that delay, the battle was fought and, regrettably, 2,096 soldiers were injured or killed.

We often take for granted the speed and accuracy of communication, but history reminds us of just how consequential delays can be.

Watch the video version of this enFact here.

There were 100+ trillion emails, texts, and IMs sent and received last year. That’s one with a bunch of zeros: 100,000,000,000,000.

How long would it take for someone to read all of those messages? Even if you could read one every second, 100 trillion seconds would take you 3.2 million years. So I wouldn’t make any plans this weekend…or any weekend.

One of the challenges Entefy is tackling is information overload. Keeping track of all of the digital information that comes our way is becoming a serious challenge—and one that is taking up more and more of our time. But don’t worry: help is on the way.

Watch the video version of this enFact here.

Voyager 1 is a space probe launched by NASA in 1977. After travelling 12.5 billion miles—and counting—it is the most distant man-made object from earth. It has been in continuous operation for 39 years and one month. Voyager 1 left our solar system in 2013 and is now in interstellar space. The spacecraft still communicates with NASA to receive routine commands and transmit data.

Imagine if Voyager 1 were to encounter other living organisms in space. Is there an intergalactic communication app that translates alien?

A British marine scientist, George Parker Bidder, dropped a bottle with a message into the North Sea on November 30, 1906 in an attempt to map the flow of currents. The message was received 108 years, 4 months, and 18 days later when Marianne Winkler found it on Amrum Island off the coast of Germany in 2015.

Communication has always brought people together. Although not quite timely, Bidder was clever in his unique attempt to send a message. Today, technology allows for instant communication. But what would happen if we didn’t have digital communication? With a postal system in flux and shrinking number of people who can write in cursive, it is hard to predict how human beings would pass along information without technology on our side.

Watch the video version of this enFact here.

The carrier pigeon Cher Ami was awarded the Croix de Guerre medal for his services and wounds received while delivering a message from the American Lost Battalion, cut off behind enemy lines during the Battle of Argonne in 1918. He helped save 194 survivors by flying a note in a canister on his left leg that read:

“We are along the road parallel to 276.4. 
Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. 
For heaven’s sake, stop it.”

Cher Ami’s message may have been shorter than a tweet, but boy did it have life-saving significance.

Watch the video version of this enFact here.

Zipf’s law explains that the usage frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table, so the most frequently used word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequently used word, three times as often as the third, and so on. This means that, on average, just 135 words account for 50% of everything we say. Here’s Oxford’s top 7 most frequently used words in the English language:

1. the
2. be
3. to
4. of
5. and
6. a
7. in

Communication is at the heart of what makes us human. What do you make of the fact that “one” ranks at 35 but “two” at 84? And “I” ranks at 10 and “we” at 27?

Entefy hosted a healthy lifestyle group from the Netherlands and Belgium. The visitors were entrepreneurs and innovation professionals from a broad list of industries including food and beverages, public health, technology, and consumer products. Their weeklong visit to Silicon Valley focused on discovering emerging trends in nutrition and healthy living. After a week of yoga, health-conscious dining, and a visit to Stanford’s d.school, Entefy was the final stop on the their tour.

Entefyers welcomed the guests with handshakes, hugs, and a selection of all-natural snacks. Sara Pieters, creativity and innovation coach, kicked off the discussion with a question for our CEO, Alston, on how Entefy’s technology can support healthy living.

Alston responded that Entefy is a platform that “shapes itself around people’s lives, and not the other way around. By making apps and services accessible in one place, the user doesn’t feel bogged down or stressed out managing devices and information.” Alston continued, “Entefy creates time that can be devoted to healthy living.”

After a wide-ranging discussion, the meeting wrapped up with our team’s warm wishes for safe travels back to Europe.

Entefy supports the exchange of ideas and information with like-minded groups around the world. We welcome the opportunity to host entrepreneurial and innovation–focused groups in the future.

Women create only 3% of startups, receive less than 10% of venture capital funding, and lead just 4% of Fortune 500 companies. Filmmakers Nora Poggi and Insiyah Saeed created a new documentary film, “She Started It,” to help change this status quo by encouraging more women to pursue entrepreneurship. Our co-founder Brienne is featured as part of this project.

“She Started It” tells the stories of five founders of technology companies, documenting the joys and challenges they faced raising capital, managing family relationships, and balancing life as young women with the demands of entrepreneurship.

Brienne first met Nora and Insiyah three years ago when both the documentary project and Entefy were just starting up. Speaking after the film’s premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival, Brienne told the 300 attendees, “It was rewarding to watch this amazing idea come to life. I’m thrilled to be a part of this film’s mission to attract more women to the technology industry.”

“She Started It” will be screened at universities, community centers, companies, and local theaters across the country as part of its continuing mission to encourage women to pursue technology careers. Share the trailer with anyone who inspires you.

Photographer: Deidre Locklear / “She Started It”

Modern tech companies, both startups and titans, are young. Their workers are young. Their brands are youthful. And the image of the 20-something founder is alive and well. So it is not surprising that the products these companies design are products intended for, and most easily used by, the young. But should this be the case?

Data shows that users aged 18-34 top rankings for device usage, app downloads, time-in-apps, and other categories that quantify digital technology usage. These users are, in aggregate, quicker to evaluate these technologies and faster to make new devices and services part of their lives. Rogers’ theory on the diffusion of innovation suggests why: digital natives maintain extensive social media networks, which expose them to new digital technologies early, and their baseline familiarity with such technologies makes them sufficiently adaptive to integrate new applications and services quickly.

But younger people clearly are not the only ones making widespread use of digital technology in their lives. Research shows that 58% of American adults age 50-64 and 30% of adults over 65 own smartphones. While they use smartphones at about half the rate of the 18-34 cohort, they are, interestingly, the leading users of tablets. Which suggests a much more nuanced picture of high technology use than is commonly presented. Differences in usage are not a matter of kind, but degree.

Now consider Emma Morano. The oldest person alive today, Ms. Morano is 116 years old, the last person on Earth from the 1800s. During her life, the first radio broadcasts were conducted and the first television sets appeared in living rooms. She had already lived for 107.5 years before the first iPhone was unveiled by Apple in 2007. How easy or difficult might Ms. Morano find using an iPhone? Many companies espouse accessibility, yet there are few examples of true universality in digital technology.

Imagine if we made digital technology universal—so easy and intuitive to use that it could enhance anybody’s life. It is almost cliché for a Silicon Valley company to define its mission as “making the world a better place.” Why should their products, then, make only some lives better? Some, but not all. The division creates a form of inequality, which makes digital technology, in effect, ageist.

But it doesn’t need to be that way. By designing apps and services that consider the needs of all users, billions of lives could be enhanced by products that improve productivity, expand communication, or enable creativity and invention. We think this is a worthy goal, and it’s why our vision of universal interaction informs and inspires everything we do.