Context: All signals available to a system at a given moment - from environmental cues and device state to user history and intent - woven into patterns that drive personalization and interaction. Context goes beyond raw data by adding interpretation. It’s dynamic and situational, potentially changing minute to minute, and often paired with a context window that defines how much information - and how recent - a model can process.
Memory: The persistent layer of context carried forward across sessions - a lasting understanding of user preferences, behaviors, and past interactions. Memory is durable but not immutable — it can be updated, pruned, or reweighted, allowing experiences to improve over time through cumulative learning.
Personal Context Infrastructure: Systems that aggregate, store, update, and share a user’s context across services, under the user’s control. It’s foundational to agentic software and personalized AI.
Personal Context Infrastructure is the most important evolution in personal technology since social media.
The social internet gave us a way to create online - to participate through our content. Social networking first used this power to bring connection, mapping our friends, relationships, and communities. Then social media grew to eclipse it, turning friendship into followership and connection into performance - fueling the creator economy, influencer commerce, and entire cultural movements.
Personal Context Infrastructure will bring the personal internet—the intelligent internet. It provides the missing layer that transforms software from generic tools into personalized intelligence that understands you, adapts to you, and acts on your behalf.
Today’s AI looks magical in demos but feels shallow in practice because it works with fragments of your story. You’re forced to keep prompting and retraining - repeating yourself across disconnected services. Context is gathered in pieces, yet the whole of who you are - and what you need - remains just out of reach.
The Current Fragmentation Problem
ChatGPT doesn’t know your communication style, your calendar app doesn’t understand your energy patterns, your streaming service doesn’t know what you’re working on this week.
Each service starts from zero, forcing endless onboarding processes that never quite capture who you really are. This fragmentation fundamentally limits what AI can do for you - the most powerful AI capabilities require rich context for understanding preferences, predicting needs, automating decisions, and taking autonomous actions.
The problem is that today the stitching together of all this context falls on us. We type, search, compare, and repeat. That is why online shopping feels like work instead of a red carpet experience. It’s 2025: software shouldn’t feel like filling forms.
Personal Context Infrastructure is the intelligent layer that aggregates and interprets the full picture of who you are across your digital life - under your control. Software should serve your life first, not a company’s quarterly goals.
Context is what software knows about you right now; memory is what it carries forward and refines over time. Personal Context Infrastructure connects the two, allowing software to remember you - not just respond.
It turns scattered data fragments into a portable digital identity that flows seamlessly between services on your terms. Think of it as your personal context server - a living memory that belongs to you, continuously enriched by your experiences and guided by your preferences - your LEARNINGS.md for digital life.
The Three Fronts of Change
Rethinking the Business Model
Today’s platforms build moats by hoarding your context—locking it inside walled gardens optimized for time on platform and ad yield. In the process, they fracture your memory across services. Personal Context Infrastructure demands new economics: platforms that earn a share of your identity, not your time, and business models that thrive on user-permissioned context liquidity instead of lock-in. See our 2024 paper on the topic here.
Rebuilding the Technical Architecture
Personal Context Infrastructure must be user-controlled by design. Your memory lives on your turf, accessible only on your terms. The context can go where you choose. This is becoming a reality with IEEE P7012 Draft Standard for Machine Readable Personal Terms (i.e. “MyTerms”), which has been in the works since 2017 and is now on track for publication early next year.
“MyTerms are contractual agreements about personal privacy that you proffer as the first party, and the company agrees to as the second party. With MyTerms, you don’t “consent” to the company’s privacy policies. They agree to your privacy requirements, which will limit the use of tracking tech to only what you allow. You are not a mere “user” or “client.” You are an independent human being operating with full agency.”
Shelf will ensure this is true with our hybrid, local-first approach and user-set privacy policies. Individuals will be able to decide how their context is shared, and apps must adhere to those terms.
Earning the Right to Context
Context isn’t merely captured - it’s earned. It comes through interfaces that invite authentic sharing from people who trust you with their digital memory. To be the trusted personal context server, you must prove - consistently and in practice - that you serve the individual, not the system. Trust is earned when people see that their history is theirs to interpret, move, and share - and that your infrastructure protects that boundary every time.
The most powerful signals come from vertical surfaces - each with its own unique affordances. ChatGPT will never know your music taste like Spotify or your watching habits like YouTube; each platform captures a different slice of context.
You can’t build Personal Context Infrastructure in a vacuum. You must fit naturally within each person’s digital ecosystem - earning trust and becoming the home for their digital memory.
Why koodos Is Uniquely Positioned
Most companies attempting this space are missing critical pieces:
AI companies build general-purpose interfaces that miss the high-signal context within specific verticals
Privacy advocates often build technically sound solutions that real people don’t want to use
Consumer apps generate engaging experiences and excel at capturing specific types of context, but each operates within its own domain
Consumer apps aren’t the problem: they’re solving real user needs and building valuable context within their verticals. The challenge is that this context remains isolated, preventing the seamless personalization users deserve across their entire digital experience. Anyone building apps today should think deeply about how their products can know the user and act on their behalf - without re-creating the infrastructure from scratch.
With Shelf, we’re building the technical core - context ingestion, inference, and permissioning - that keeps memory under user control. But we’re building more than technology; technology matters only when culture adopts it. Millions already use Shelf to connect their services and keep a digital record of their lives. Shelf isn’t just what you listened to, watched, read or consumed - it’s a portrait of you: your year, your growth, and the culture you belong to. When something appears on more than one person’s Shelf, it becomes culture. For Shelf to feel like a companion rather than inventory management, it must move at the speed of you, your community, and culture at large. We’re building a brand that not only reflects culture - it drives it.
Context Is All You Need
Context is becoming the most valuable currency of the digital age - it will decide which AI services survive in a hyper-personalized future where actions are taken for you. That power must be distributed and placed in service of the individual.
The question isn’t whether Personal Context Infrastructure will be built – it’s who will build it and whose interests it will serve.
We believe it should serve yours, enabling AI that amplifies human potential while preserving and strengthening human agency. Not by competing with the services you love, but by helping them understand you better, on your terms.
Context is all you need. Make sure it belongs to you.