SIRI: your personal assistant in the cloud

Found via Scobleizer.

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Watch the video till the very end. In the last 4 minutes or so there is a demo.

In essence its a free iPhone app with a fantastic voice recognition engine, that is orchestrating API’s in the cloud.

Normal – not geek – people ask me regularly: “But Peter, what do you mean with “cloud computing” and “semantic web ?”

SIRI is a wonderful example of what’s next. If you want to have an idea what semantic web means in practice, here you go. It’s location aware, it’s self learning, has some eMe elements like profile awareness, all of this in the privacy control of the owner of the profile data.

The dream of the personal butler coming true.

Why this is important ? In the words of Robert Scoble:

Don’t get confused by the awesome voice recognition engine that figures out your speech and what you want with pretty good accuracy. No, that’s not the really cool thing, although Microsoft and other companies have been working on natural language search for many years now and have been failing to come up with anything as useful as Siri.

No, the real secret sauce and huge impact on the future of the web is in the back end of this thing. A few months back the engineers at Siri gave me a secret look at how they stitch the APIs into the system. They’ve built a GUI that helps them hook up the APIs from, say, a new source like Foursquare, into the language recognition engine.

And listen to the two founders on how the back-end of this thing is working, and the other cool stuff they have in mind.

And now start thinking on what you could do with this in financial services:

  • Give me the best loan for car so and so
  • I want to buy this piece of art and need a credit line
  • Find me the cheapest routing for USD payment with cut-off time x
  • Get me to …

Would be very curious of guys like Richard Branson of Virgin Bank start to play with this. Or Sean Park with his view on software components in the cloud. How does this change our thinking on building an AppStore for Financial Services ?

I don’t have an iPhone (yet). But i know super-geeks Nick and PeterH have one. Nick, can you test this one, and let me know your candid feedback ?

Check out www.siri.com

 

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Hug my PAD

TEDxBerlin talk, discovered via Hutch Carpenter’s blog

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View till the end.

It’s a bit funny at the end, and you can hear the audience laughing at this and not really taking the last bit seriously.

Think twice.

Think this one through ! In the same blog post, Hutch points at the real meaning of the iPAD.

Think it through. The keyword is digital intimacy. Your computer is not your computer anymore.

Think generation-M. Generation Meaning.

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It’s your personal “pad”-device.

You can give it a pad.

You can hug it, it can hug you.

Try in your imagination to mix up iPhone, iPAD and those little house-robots that were so popular some years ago. I know my friend Nick has 2 in his apartment !

Nick Carr used the title “Hello iPAD, Goodbye PC”.

I think he’s right on.

Innovations 2009: my Top-7

The full top-100 is published on POPSCI.

Here is my personal selection top-7 out of those 100 and my personal why. Why seven ? Because 7 is my lucky number. No, i just did not like cutting out one of these 😉

 

vue_0

Short description: It’s the ultimate plug-’n’-play nanny-cam. The Vue personal video network lets users place cordless cameras virtually anywhere and view video in real time on the Web.

Why: Dead of Privacy. At DEMO 2009, i saw another plug-and-play security camera for less than 199 USD. Why complain about all those public cameras in the UK, if any person can put one anywhere anytime ?

 

 

fujifilm

Short description: Fujifilm 3D Camera is the first 3-D digital point-and-shoot camera, with two separate lenses—and two image sensors—placed three inches apart. They snap either stills or videos in tandem, and a processor combines their images into a single file.

Why: This and the release of the 3D Movie Avatar will really put 3D in the mainstream in 2010.

 

 

 Planck satellite in  the Large Space Simulator at ESA's test centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.

Short description: Herschel Space Observatory, the European Space Agency’s Planck Observatory will study the radiation left over from the first 370,000 years after the big bang—known as the cosmic microwave background, or CMB—with three times the sharpness of previous satellites. Can detect temperature differences in the CMB as small as millionths of a degree (the equivalent of detecting the body heat of a rabbit on the moon, from Earth).

Why: i expect a breakthrough in 2010 in cosmic breakthrough research that will challenge our traditional thinking about time and space.

 

 

 

Short description: it’s about the headpiece, not the chair. The nonsurgical NeuroStar Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation system is as easy as a teeth cleaning. The patient sits in a chair as an electromagnetic coil pulses magnetic fields to his or her left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that regulates mood. This stimulates neurons to make more mood-enhancing dopamine. After 30 40-minute daily sessions, half of the patients in a clinical trial experienced significantly reduced symptoms; a third reported complete resolution. Last fall, it became the first TMS therapy to earn FDA approval.

Why: breakthroughs in brain research, implants and stimulation are just around the corner. At Singularity Summit 2009, i saw another example of light stimulation of very specific brain zones (up to the cell level !)

 

 

 

Short description: Nintendo Wii on steroids.  A prototype system dubbed Project Natal lets Xbox 360 games respond to anything from full-body lunges to subtle hand gestures, voice input and even facial expressions. Unlike the Wii, you don’t hold anything. Your movements and voice control the game.

Why: New forms of UI will we omnipresent in 2010. Expect this sort of stuff to be standard in any modern OS, tablet or PDA as from 2011.

 

 

 

Short description: The City Safety system of the 2010 Volvo XC60 can stop itself before you smack the stopped car in front of you. A laser sensor tracks the distance between you and the car ahead; approach too quickly, and the system hits the brakes.

Why: Computer assisted cars becoming mainstream. Also look at the loads of technology squeezed in the latest Opel Astra (standard model). Main reason: somehow my dream car, and i hope somebody from Volvo reads this and gives me one 🙂

 

 

 

Short description: Should be no surprise to anybody reading this blog. I am a big fan of Google Wave.

Why: 2010 will be Wave year. The criticasters of 2009 will cry and be ashamed once Google fixes this one.

Future of e-Magazines

Great video on how e-Magazines may look like in 2010 when the iTablet gets released.

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I recently bought myself a Kindle, and i am VERY disappointed. 259 USD is a lot of money for a device you can only read Amazon books on. And it does not even have a zoom for it’s “built-in” Adobe reader.

For 259 USD, you get a netbook these days.

Does anybody know what the device is used in this video ?

UPDATE: Appkle iTablet planned for Jan 2010 ? Can’t wait.

http://venturebeat.com/2009/12/23/apple-tablet-january/

apple-tablet

Natural Language Interface Microsoft Research

With thx to xstof for spotting this one. Looks like i cannot embed the video, so please go here or click the picture below.

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It turns out 2019 is getting closer every day. At the moment, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officerCraig Mundie is doing the rounds at a number of prestigious colleges in the States showing off Microsoft’s vision for technology to solve the world’s biggest problems. Of course, one must use the latest in natural user interfaces for this task.

A feature of this year’s tour appears to be a next-generation computer – one that docks and undocks from a transparent glass display and allows for not only pen and voice input as you’d come to expect from natural user interfaces, but also incorporates touchless gestures and eye-tracking to interact with the information at hand.

Getting closer to the Minority Report type of interfaces 😉

Augmented Reality is Real Now

The big news this week is that Layar’s iPhone App is approved and available.

From now on we call it the “Reality Browser”

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See also sub-line “Available for Android”. I clicked on the Android Marketplace and this is what i got.

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Also have a look at the 162 Layers that are already available. Yes, you got it right: 162 Layers available already.

Droid vs. iPhone

droidlogo-1

The blogs are full these days of Android phones coming to the market. Especially on the Verizon-Motorola-Android phone that is being launches as we speak.

I just picked one of the articles: the one from Michael Arrington on TechMeme.

+++Update: very complete update by Scobleizer on 8 Nov 2009.

From a US perspective probably the key differentiators is that Droid comes with Verizon. Every time i meet folks in the US, they complain like hell about AT&T. In other regions this may be less relevant – as some countries do not allow packages deals – and many have hacked iPhones that use other providers.

I don’t think Apple cares a lot about the hacked iPhones. Sold is sold. For Apple it is about market share in highly profitable markets. They have already very successfully milked the iPhone profit/cash cow. They may be worried about marketshare competition with Android. But Apple will for sure come-up with something else that is completely disruptive – not necessarily in iPhone land – to reset the landscape once again. And who still talks about Windows Mobile, albeit the latest version was released only a couple of weeks ago with a lot of marketing dollars ?

Last i heard that iPhone in the US is on its own counting for 21% of all mobile internet browsing. That’s a really big part of the mobile pie. No wonder Google goes full steam ahead.

You probably all have read about Google being bullish during last weeks financial results: crisis is over, Android going to be very very big, and going to really spend money in innovation. What will that mean ? Already now, Google is cranking our one innovation after the other. At about one announcement per week. So, now they are going to really invest in innovation ? They sit on a cash-pile of more than 20 billion USD. It will be very interesting to see where they will put their money.

Next week, Microsoft in launching Windows 7. I just read that Apple has almost 10% of the “PC” market in the US. Looking at recent history, i would not be surprised that both Google and Apple will use the publicity momentum of Windows 7 to undercut Microsoft’s airspace with some of their own announcements.

My good friend Nick was already playing with one of the Android phones when we are at Sibos. As a matter of fact, Nick has something like seven (7 !) mobile devices in his backpack ! Anything from the iPhone and iTouch to the latest HTC (with our without Windows) and the latest Android.

He told me: “once you have touched the Android phone, you realize how outdated the iPhone is “. Wow.

The key question will be whether Google can build an as successfull application marketplace as Apple. Nick runs more than 350 iPhone apps on his iPhone and his iTouch.

So Nick knows what he talks about. Nick, feel free to jump into the comments and share your reflections on the iPhone vs. Android debate.

Future of shopping by Cisco

Life is full of synchronicities. This week we had a meeting with the Innovation team of Cisco to learn from each other how we stimulate innovation in our organizations and ecosystems.

I was surprised how much Cisco is “looking” more and more like Microsoft. Not from product side, but from the way on how they look at introducing new technologies into their enterprise customer base, trying to cross the chasm with dedicated sales specialists and consultants, looking for the next 1-10B $ business, etc, etc

Now i discover by coincidence (my morning reading in Google Reader) the following video about the future of shopping. It could have been part of Microsoft’s 2019 Future videos. It also shows what happens if one of the big boys starts to mingle in the augmented reality debate big time.

There are 2 more videos that i found via on YouTube:

And

At the end of the videos, there is a link to Cisco’s website. The video seems to be part of a campaign to announce some live on-line 20 Oct 2009 “Experience events”

Sound interesting to me. I copied the registration details below:

Americas – Tues., Oct. 20, 11:00 PDT (18:00 GMT)
Europe – Tues., Oct. 20, 14:00 CET (12:00 GMT)
Asia Pacific – Wed., Oct 21, 13:30 Beijing (5:30 GMT)

PayPal vs. Banks

On Nov 3, 2009 the world of payments will change. PayPal will open its platform to developer worldwide.

A glimpse of what this means can be seen in the following video:

How will traditional banks respond ? Hopefully a subject for the Innotribe Face to Face discussion on The Future of Banking next week during Sibos 2009.

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The hype of Augmented Reality

Good overview of latest Augmented Reality examples on ReadWriteWeb.

The example i “like” most is the Augmented Identity one.

I am re-iterating the thinking we did before on this blog on how any on-line person is starting to have its own “information shadow” that is unique. No more need for identity “cards” or alike.

In that context, I recently met Dave Birch, Director at Consult Hyperion, who is 1) a very cool presenter on identity and digital money and 2) has two pretty interesting blogs on these subjects:

– His identity blog is here

– His money blog is here

Not much to add to the ReadWriteWeb article.

Have a deep dive in Gartner’s 2009 Hype Circle for Emerging Technologies.

gartner-emerging-technologies-hype-cycle-2009

See also that Human Augmentation now appears at the very start of the Technology Triggers.