Many of us Google ourselves

Jack Dikian

November 2011

There are many of us who Google ourselves fairly regularly. The reasons are mostly about keeping tabs on our online reputations, checking to see what prospective employers will know and/or even just being vain.

According to a report from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, 57% of American adults keep tabs on their online identities. That's up from 47 percent in 2006.

And we don’t just Google ourselves. 46% of adults say they have used online searchers to find information about people from their past.38% have searched for friends and 16 % have scoured for facts about a person they were dating.

The Google X factor - our future

Jack Dikian

November 2011

There are some of us who as kids didn’t grow up having a microwave oven to heat afterschool snakes. Some of us would never have dreamed of replacing batteries in a toothbrush. And household products like the Blue-ray, Bluetooth, Dyson, Flat-screen, iPod were to be in our collective future.

Sometimes we see products emerge from lesser ones. Products change, evolve and transform as with the introduction of DVDs replacing VHS Video or CDs replacing Cassette decks. In other cases products just seem to emerge; almost overnight and we are left asking how did we do without - a paradigm change.

Did we see the electric toothbrush coming; the car radio aerial imbedded into the windscreen, the light bulb that messages us, warning it’s nearing the end of its life. Okay, so we can’t buy a message send light bulb just yet – but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

This brings me to my point, the Internet of Things somewhat like the current Internet of Networks which serve our insatiable appetite for information and data communication. Think the Jetsons, where pantries keep their own inventories, supermarket trolleys that know what’s thrown in them and homes that remember what’s in their own junk drawers. How about your dinner plate posting to Facebook what you’re eating, even better your toilet analysing what comes out the other end for the presence of substances indicating failing health.

See http://ideasclinic.blogspot.com/2010/12/seamless-urine-testing.html

We made a great deal of inroad in showcasing the “store of the future” in the nineties when I was a Management Consultant at Accenture (Andersen Consulting). I was also fortunate enough to visit the MIT Media Lab which has always been known for its broad range of human-machine research and innovation. It seems now (probably for a while) Google has been dabbling and bringing shoot-for-the-stars ideas that little bit nearer.

Google X, is the clandestine lab where Google is tackling ideas which are, according to some, at various stages of development with some close to becoming reality within a year or two.

“They’re pretty far out in front right now,” said Rodney Brooks, a professor emeritus at MIT’s computer science and artificial intelligence lab and founder of Heartland Robotics. “But Google’s not an ordinary company, so almost nothing applies.”

"We've always been optimistic about technology's ability to advance society, which is why we have pushed so hard to improve the capabilities of self-driving cars beyond where they are today," Sebastian Thrun, a software engineer at Google, blogged last year.

Bongo Bongo

Jack Dikian

November 2011

Recently a friend (a good friend) has been fascinated by the SMS Text-based Bongo service. The idea is that you text your name, age and your town/city, and it will shortly return a text message that she says is freakishly accurate. And from all accounts it seems so.

The concept certainly pricked my interest for a lot of reasons. After all, how can a system return meaningful information based on so little context? Yes I am aware that in Artificial intelligence, EXPERT systems have been designed to interrogate knowledge bases using a natural language interface and return useful knowledge, however, they all work within limited purpose-build data/knowledge repositories.

What Bongo seems to be doing is more generalized and I would think probably using a human element to decipher the question posed (the very difficult part) and then use a gamut of search engines to piece together a response.

So it’s an interesting service from a number of perspectives; Information systems, Information theory, the impact of the advent of social networking, the rise of personal information in 3^rd party repositories, and so and so forth.

Oh, and how does Bongo work? Well most of the answer is actually provided by Bongo themselves. You just need to read their published service policy carefully. It pretty much gives you all the clues. Go to http://199bongo.com/our-policy

Google Plus - invite?

Jack Dikian

September 2011

So are you like me waiting for a Google Plus invite? Come-on Christian, Larry, and Sergey I’m etching to get my mittens into this. As we’ve heard Google is rolling out the service in waves and we can expect it to become a ubiquitous social option real soon. Early users of Facebook will know that if two people wanted to see each other’s updates, both needed to “friend” each other. Of course we can “like” groups now too. Twitter has always been a one-way thing. I can follow you but you do not necessarily have to follow me back.

Google Plus provides the ability to see updates from certain groups like "Work," "Friends" and/or "Family" (Circles) as well as the ability for one main stream. Here are some of the Plus features

• Circles - The idea that we share different things with different people. So sharing the right content with the right people is a plus.
• Hangouts - You will be able to let specific people or an entire circle you are hanging out and then see who drops by for a face-to-face-to-face chat.
• Sparks - By telling Sparks your interests and it will send you content that it guesses you’ll like.
• Huddle - turns different conversation threads into one simple group chat, getting everyone onto the same page.