In this post we were trying to focus on the problems we've personally experienced as algorithm developers. The plan is to explain the details of Algorithmia more in future posts, but here's the basic idea:

We want smarter machines, and that means making algorithms more widely available. To achieve that, we're creating a community around algorithm development, where people can contribute code and collaborate with others on that code. Github has done a great job of this, but it is not always trivial to get from a github repo to live code in production. We think that creating a built-in market for algorithms-as-a-service could be a way to reward algorithm developers for their work, and make algorithms easily accessible via REST API.

The types of algorithms we are talking about is not limited by us. My opinion is that the most useful algorithms in the near future will be related to: machine learning, classification, analysis, and optimization. There are also numerous applications for things like image recognition, speech-to-text, and translation, to name a few.