# The Vortimo File

> The story of one idea, organizing the web by information instead of by site, rebuilt three times across nine years. This page is the placeholder for vortimo.com and osint-tool.com, and it points visitors to the current product, Ubikron. It is published by Vortimo, the company founded by Roelof Temmingh, creator of Maltego.

## The idea

Every browser organizes the internet by site: you visit one address, then another, and whatever you learn is scattered across tabs with no memory of how it connects. The idea behind all of these products is the opposite: organize the web by the information itself, the people, topics, and entities you are actually investigating, and keep a structured, searchable record of everything you have seen.

It began as a talk in April 2017 ("Bitching about how we consume information on the internet today", given at KPN's Guest Hacker Program). The same idea was then built three times.

## The three attempts

- **Vortimo (2019 to 2021, discontinued)**: A full investigation platform delivered as a browser extension. Captured entire pages as MHTML, ran named-entity recognition, and stored everything in a local database that could be tagged, filtered, searched, and graphed, with an automated crawler (AutoVort) and court-ready evidence packs. The most capable of the three, but too heavy and too complex. The idea was proven; the product was not usable.
- **Skylight, later renamed OSINT-Tool (2022 to 2023, discontinued)**: The opposite bet. A lightweight Chromium extension plus a lookup web app, no install and no local database, with a history graph built from real navigation. But it was too light to hold a real investigation: no page archiving, no full-text search, no tagging, and everything trapped in one local browser, so cases could not be shared.
- **Ubikron (2023 to present, active)**: The current product, and another full rewrite carrying the lessons of the first two. A browser extension again, but the data lands on a real server instead of a single machine, with clean separation between client and server and a self-hostable Docker stack for sensitive work. It keeps Vortimo's depth (entity extraction, case notes, link-analysis graph) without the local-only ceiling that killed OSINT-Tool. The pro version adds a visual graph, one-click enrichment APIs, and an MCP server so AI assistants can work the case alongside the analyst.

## Where to go

- Current product: https://ubikron.com
- Ubikron on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ubikron/
- Ubikron on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaeXG6mMw5ISOIGk_RAvK_Q

## About

- Company: Vortimo
- Location: Pretoria, South Africa
- Founder: Roelof Temmingh, creator of Maltego
- Vortimo and OSINT-Tool are closed chapters, kept online as proof of work. The work they were both trying to do continues as Ubikron.

## Keywords

OSINT, open source intelligence, investigation workbench, browser extension, entity extraction, link analysis, threat intelligence, Vortimo, OSINT-Tool, Skylight, Ubikron, Maltego, Roelof Temmingh