American Information Exchange

The American Information Exchange (AMIX) was a platform for the buying and selling of information, goods and services as well as the exchange of information, ideas, and certain kinds of intellectual work product, created by economist and futurist Phil Salin in the 1980s.

Starting in 1984, Salin worked to create AMIX as an international network for the exchange of information, consulting contracts, computer code and research. He envisaged a world in which the ready exchange of expertise would reduce transaction costs, with wide-ranging beneficial effects. In particular, he predicted that information markets would reduce the need for redundant employees at different organizations, so that companies would become smaller and more efficient, relying on each other as external sources of expertise. He also expected revolutionary political changes as the markets became widely adopted.

The AMIX project originated long before the widespread deployment of the Internet, so the challenge of creating the market was compounded by the technical difficulty of creating the network on which it would run.

Autodesk acquired a controlling interest in AMIX in 1988 and funded it until shortly after Phil Salin died in December 1991. Among early adopters, the computer industry itself became the source of many early markets such as a network for the exchange of libraries of object-oriented computer code. AMIX closed its doors in 1992.

While still active, the firm was discussed in The Economist and Forbes, and has since been cited in patent filings.[1]