Huginn & Muninn

by Bryon D Beilman

Who or what are Huginn and Muninn and why do you care? They are a couple of Ravens that used to fly all over the world and gather information to bring back for the Norse God Odin.  These figures in Norse Mythology Huginn (Old Norse "Thought") and Muninn (Old Norse "Memory") appear in 13th century literature.

How does this relate to you Mr. Odin or how is it relative to today?  Let me put it in the context of Information Technology.  What technologies do you use to keep you abreast of information?  Perhaps Huginn and Muninn were reborn as Larry Page and Sergey Brinn who set out to gather useful information in the world and bring it back for you.  Perhaps their current incarnations are merely bots and information aggregrators; the kind used for news by the Drudge Report  or News Now, or maybe it's financial information gathered and provided for a fee by Reuters or Bloomberg . Perhaps the two Ravens are proponents of the Open Source movement and are now named Freshmeat and Sourceforge.    Whatever the case, humans have been interested in keeping abreast of information for quite some time. The technology has changed from Ravens to Bits, Bytes and Bots, and coming at us faster than we can use them.

As a final observation, what is the link between Odin and the top CEO's of large corporations?  Some might think it is the long beard and a helmet with horns on the top, but it is really information. Sure some of them are very talented and hard working, but think of all the information about their business, market and industry that is processed from their management team, business intelligence systems and given to them to make those ever important decisions.  I have known many CEO's that are down and dirty and in the trenches like many others, but sometimes I see speeches from CEO's or Venture Capitalists who have amazing insight. I cannot help to think that it is because of the information they have been given, aggregated and digested.  If you were a venture capitalist, think of how many  Huginns and Muninns present to you each week with business plans, market analysis and interesting ideas (and perhaps many , not so interesting ideas).

It turns out that Huginn and Muninn are pretty valuable.