Interesting remarks from Pearson. Now that I have a decidedly intelligent agent focus, in antiticipation of grad school, I wonder if even more is possible.
Social applications are certainly on the rise. In theory, geolocating cellphones should be possible in the US courtesy of
e911 sometime soon if not already. Extending that capability for commercial purposes is extremely possible. Combine that with Google Maps and it establishes a location and a context. Combine that with the ability to automatically notify certain contacts listed on my cellphone of my location and then my friends can attempt to intuit what I'm up to at any given moment.
Actually, the notification mechanism is actually entirely practical given the variety of messaging systems avialable on the market (CORBA Notification Service and
Java Messaging Service come to mind). Both systems implement a publish-subscribe model where a message is published by an individual and can be received by one or more subscribers. Add a user-center access control mechanism for my phone and then I can specify which phone numbers can receive my location. Other users could then subscribe (or not) for updates from my phone to theirs. No horribly fancy privacy features necessary. Granted there's a matter of scaling the solution but these messaging systems are design for that sort of thing.
But now that my friends know that I'm at the mall, now what? They don't know if I'm out shopping, having a meal alone or with a friend, or if I'm sitting in the mall's movie theatre with a hot date (well, ok, my fiance--but she's a hot date and I better keep on saying that if I know what's good for me).
Simplifying user interfaces is a good thing but commensurately reducing functionality is not necessarily so. Mobile devices could easily use my location and time to provide contextual suggestions. If it's about noon, I'm in motion (fairly easy to detect if my position can be tracked over time), and have been so for say a couple of hours, and happen to be near a mall, my PDA could then perform a quick query of Zagat's Guide, find a few good restaurants, sound a gentle chime, and tell me about them.
I'm wracking my brain for an interesting way for multiple anonymous PDAs to share contextual information to solve more interesting problems. Thoughts?