I was walking on the banks of the Allier river in the Auvergne, France, when I heard a whirring sound in the reed just next to me.
In spite of all my education and time spent in identifying animals, I had to admit i could not even tell whether this species was a kind of toad or a kind of cricket… Then it popped in my mind that it should by now, I’m talking 1998, very well possible to just grab my microphone, record the sound, and within an instance let the speaker from the laptop in my backpack tell me the right name of that creature! All in between steps are already developed in this IT era, it was just a matter of connecting it all together. An idea was born.
In the years from then on I scoped to the topic of converting from dichotomous keys to multi-acces keys, and devoted time to learn developing dynamic web pages with Oracle Apex. I realized the idea forms a nice crossroad between all my time spent in biology and all my time spent in computers. And the use of Apex confined to elements I was already familiar with: setting up data models, working with Visual Basic and Oracle PlSql programming.